Rust and Tarnish
by Cobray
Summary: What happens when you wake to find the life you have isn't the one you wanted, with nobody there to help you escape it? What happens when the life you made for yourself becomes a weight growing every day, and nobody to help you bear it? When people you once trusted become strangers with daggers in their hands, two old enemies will be thrown together to find out, or die trying
1. Prologue

"_There!"_

"Just like we planned."

We crouch behind the rocks as the ship comes screaming over the horizon like an angel falling from heaven, shedding metal wings and burning fuel into the forest around us as it slices through bark and foliage. I cover my ears with my arms as the earth under us rumbles and shifts as the Esthar craft crashes to earth with a head-splitting roar of smoke and fire. I shield my eyes away from the glare and hear a gasp from one of the others as they do the same. I count seconds under my breath and after ten seconds the chaos and flying rubble are gone, and it's time.

"_GO!"_

I'm already scrambling down the rock-face before the glow fades and I just hope the others are keeping up with me. Response time from the town is getting better now that they're expecting something, and I want to be gone before they get here.

"_One's up!"_

I dodge burning rubber and white-hot steel as I jump across the churned ground to the broken ship, already looking at the hatch as it falls out, booted open from the inside by someone who was lucky but not lucky enough. He either wasn't told about the previous attacks or he was too careless to gear up before liftoff, because he swings down from the hull to the ground without a weapon or armour. I leap the final few steps from the uneven ridges the ship has scored into the earth and onto solid ground. There's a half-second where he notices me and smiles – _help has come – _and he doesn't have time for anything else, two bullets into his chest before he can raise a hand to say a word. I keep my aim on him as he falls to the ground, but he doesn't come up again. We crouch there outside the steel, all five of us for a second pointing our guns into the belly of the craft, but nobody else comes out.

I speak. "Alright, to work."

There's nobody else alive inside. The inside of the craft was designed for cheapness and hardiness, not comfort. Hard angles and sharp edges took care of the crew and there's blood and bits of meat everywhere, like an angry child throwing buckets of paint onto the walls. For all the gruesome redecorating though it's exactly like the plans we have, and I weave my way across the carnage to the bulkhead, at the back. Five soldiers should have been protecting this small secured chamber, but the four bodies outside it aren't capable. The fifth must have been the luckless man we took care of outside. The door slides open, still in perfect working order, and the other man is sitting inside, all on his own, barely stirring from unconsciousness. I take a deep breath, deep as I can, and hold it as I go up and hold the knife to his throat.

_Please, don't…_

I ignore it and the job is done in half a second. I make sure my bare palm is against his face as it happens, make sure we have a direct physical connection. It's then that I feel it, like a half-ghost whispering across my arm and up through my eyeballs into my brain. For a second it feels like my skull's being pushed out of my head and then…nothing. Like nothing happened at all. I feel my skin crawl anyway, if everyone I've been told is correct it's back in there now, making itself at home after such a close escape from the dying host.

"Was that it?" someone breathes behind me. It sounds like one of the younger ones, all wide-eyed and innocent. As innocent as they could be for this job at any rate.

"Yes. Let's go." I turn and leave, skin still crawling, and then I hear it. A short noise sounds from the forest outside, a dull _pop_ almost lost in the creaking of the cooling metal we're surrounded by.

"Was that-"

I tap her in the chest to shut her up before she can say anything else and she falls quiet. I'm hyperaware, every sense awake and pointed to the direction we came in from. I'm stood inside an iron coffin with no other way out but the hatch we got in by and there's somebody out there firing a weapon. There's nothing I can do. Judgement call. I tap the rookie on the shoulder and swing my finger outside; _go see._ She just nods and heads out, boots tapping quietly on the floor as she goes out. I can see a shadow moving in the dim light beyond as she leaves the ship, and keeps moving. For a second I dare to breathe again – _maybe one of the others saw a hare and got an itchy trigger-finger – _but then I know that can't be right.

"There's nobody out here. I- _ah!"_

She squeaks a half-breath out before _something_ rolls over here like a gag and she falls silent. I don't dare ask what happened. I don't need to, as a voice I don't recognise calls out from beyond the hatchway. A long slow drawl.

"I know you're still in there. Just come out now before you make me come in there."

The nightmare. I was told every time I went out and again when I came back. Can't be captured. Can't be used. Don't let it happen. My gun feels heavy in my hand and I know I can't do it like that. There has to be-

"Your kid here's fine. Just come out with no dumb shit and this can end easy for at least two of you."

Those dumb bastards, of course they'd have fought. Didn't hear the gunfire. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Caught up in the moment, didn't check the mystery-man for a flak-jacket and now here I am trapped with no way-

_One way._

Of course. Why didn't I think of it before? I drop the lockbox and run back into the room. It's ghoulish but I have no other choice, and before I'm done with the bodies my hands are coated in blood. Blood and two round objects that will see me home. I push the box to the edge of the hatch and wait a second. To make sure he's still out there.

"I don't know what you think you're doing but-"

The grenades are away before he's finished speaking. His voice cuts off with a squawk every bit as surprised as the rookie whose name I hadn't bothered to learn, and now never would have to. I crouch down, hands covering my eras as there's an earth-shaking pair of booms from outside that ring the metal ship like a gong. Before it's faded the lockbox is in my hands and my feet are falling towards the forest floor. I land hard and almost topple, feet in something red and messy – _sorry kid – _but I ignore it. I spare a glance and double-check everything I see. The man's thrown himself away and he's already getting back up. I don't trust myself to try and take him down, not with my balance wrecked from having a giant metal bucket rang like a bell over my head. I can see two sprawled bodies in the grass and I can feel the third underfoot, and that's all I could hope for.

"_STOP!"_

I turn and our eyes meet for a second, a second too long. I know the face, I can only pray to Hyne and all His angels that the man doesn't recognise me back, although there's small chance of that. I run as fast as I can away from the crash-site, clambering back up the rocks I'd leapt down minutes ago, towards the buggy that will get me out. I hear a single word-

"_WAIT!"_

-and then a moment later the whistles of bullets close to my head. Another second and I'm down to the other side of the massive stones that had shielded us from the crash-landing. Another second and the engine is revving and I'm gone, leaving nothing behind but corpses and burning rubble. Whether the man was just a lucky survivor or a plant expecting trouble I don't care. He can wrangle answers out of whatever he has back there.

Bodies and burning metal.


	2. Crumbling Facade

_I can hear the waves crashing in my ears, the water around us mixing with the blood covering my arms. I'm holding my hands on his chest, as if somehow keeping the red liquid inside his body will keep his spark from flying out of his body. He tries to speak but the noise comes from the hole in his throat like some obscene whistle._

_Just stay quiet, just stay quiet._

_I can't help and I don't know why. I had power once, even besides the power granted from the things we kept in our heads. Now I look inside my heart and the blue light isn't there anymore. The girl is knelt next to me and flicking her head back and forth between us like a metronome, _can't you do something can't you help can't you can't you can't you_._ _It mixes with the gunfire still whirling over our heads into some insane healing chant that doesn't work. I tell him to stay with me but I don't have the strength to keep him here, and he's dragged down and away, and I take my bloody hands off his chest._

_They take us off the beach hours later and we leave the sand and blood behind us. Two on our own feet, one carried out in a bag. Four others not carried not at all. All the trip back she stares at me over the heavy bag that lies on the floor between us. I know what question she wants to ask me but I pray she doesn't because I have no answer, none at all._

_And for what?_

_I try to call it up once more, back at Garden, safe and warm in my quarters where no-one can see. There's a spark, maybe, for a second. Then nothing, and no matter how much I try I can't call it up. Maybe I left it back on that beach, stripped away by the ghosts of the people I led there and left behind._

_And for what?_

* * *

It's a beautiful night.

We're sitting low in the water off the coast, the waves rolling in from the deep sea and smashing against the smooth metal of Garden's shell. The ocean is thrown up into the air drop by drop, the moon behind it shining through every pearl and covering the ballroom in a curtain of shimmering white light. I can hear the tinkle and chime of glasses tapping together, gentle laughter and the content small-talk of people who have to work together all day and then see each other the rest of the time and don't mind at all. The long party is winding down at last, the pictures taken and the guests departed.

Outside the huge glass panes I stand in front of the world is quiet, the crashing of the waves far below reaching us this high up as only a pretty lightshow and a wafting breeze. Violence deep down and far away reaches the surface as nothing more than a ripple. The feeling is one I'm familiar with.

I'm not happy. In the last week, the last month, maybe the last year. Like a creeping feeling in my mind and heart I just can't shake. The small things started first. My pen-hand would shake a little marking the fifth-dozen report that week. I'd lose focus and find myself staring out over the landscape when I should have been listening to whatever Xu or Nida was telling me. And always, always I'd feel that little creeping noise in my head that told me something wasn't right. This wasn't where I should be. I'd taken myself from missions where I could, but eventually it would happen somewhere that mattered. The last week I'd stayed in Garden for the lead-up to this reception, and nothing I'd tried helped.

Now I'm here in the only place I can call home, surrounded by the people I loved most in the world, and I felt sick to death.

"Waves getting to you Quisty?"

I turned to see Selphie walking over to me with a smile on your face. "I still get a little seasick sometimes."

"You want to come back over? I've got food I hid from the Galbadian delegates."

"In a minute. I- hey!"

Selphie wrapped an arm around my shoulders. "C'mooon, this is our night!" I had to brace myself to stay standing as she tried to swing around and pull me towards the centre. "We got it this time, I know it Q. Peace and love!"

The fifth peace in as many years. Like gruesome clockwork that breaks down with the regularity of the tides and can only be repaired with blood. The treaty was signed tonight and it had been handshakes all around, but I know the contracts will start coming in in a half-year or less, and it doesn't matter what was said tonight, I'll still watch as our landing-craft go off to deter or uproot whatever islet or town Galbadia will be staking their claim to. As for love? Love wasn't a subject I liked to look at. I could feel anger somewhere down in my stomach, closer than it used to be. I had to get rid of it somehow before it overwhelmed me, and the training centre was already shut. Maybe a drink would help. "Sure, why not?" I let Selphie drag me away from the ocean and the moonlight, back into the warmth of the ballroom. I can see the table everyone is sat around, talking together like we have for a thousand nights.

"Hey there. Thought you left a while back?" Zell asked as I drew up a chair.

"Just getting some air," I replied as I sat down. "Looks like you're already working on cleaning up what the guests didn't eat, how considerate of you all."

"Shame to let good stuff go to waste." Zell shoved a breadstick into his mouth like it was a cigar, and grinned. I smiled back. Selphie was right, it did feel better here. Even if only for a little while. "Think it'll work this time?" the young mercenary-hero asked through a mouthful of bread.

Selphie waggled a finger. "Nuh-uh, no more shoptalk tonight." She looked harried and I could see her fingers tapping away on the table. Nobody had worked harder than Selphie to make sure this came off. Cid and Squall had brought the warring states to the table, but the rest of us had made sure the table was there. Or at least, most of us. Irvine being away hadn't helped her mood, and for the last month she'd teetered between furious energy and exhausted overwork. Whenever the man got back from whatever mission or assignment Garden had him on, he was going to be deep in trouble.

"Hey, at least you were back for this one, right?" Zell asked, oblivious to the small wince from Selphie. Either he shared my own doubts or, more likely, just wasn't thinking about the words coming out of his mouth. Either way he'd hit on something the rest of the table seemed intent on not digging at. "You sticking around this time?"

"For a while," I said. "Just to check everything's still working."

"See I told you she'd miss us," Selphie said authoritatively. Squall just snorted with amusement and I couldn't help but laugh.

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder." I nearly jumped out of my skin and shifted around in the chair to see Xu standing behind me. I had no idea how long she'd been standing there for. Being able to slip silently in and out of crowds and rooms was a good skill for a mercenary, but Xu's stealthy movement could be more than a little eerie. The brunette turned to look at her Commander. "Can I borrow Quistis for a few minutes?"

Squall only nodded, the excitement that covered the rest of the half-empty ballroom seeming to slide through him without leaving any of itself behind in him. I knew why of course. He always did…revert…a little whenever Rinoa was gone. The shell he'd once hid inside may have been broken but old habits died hard, and whenever his fiancé was away he became just a little more subdued and monosyllabic.

Xu looked down at me. "Do you mind?"

I shrugged. "Sure." Xu just cocked an eyebrow at me and I stood. "I'll be back, save some of that for me alright?" I told the others at the table.

"No promises," Selphie and Zell said almost at the same time, and burst out laughing as I walked away.

* * *

"So what was all that about?"

"All what about?" I asked as we walked through the dark halls towards the centre of Garden. With the doors shut the sounds coming from the party inside sounded like they were far, far away, and the frosted glass of the doors made it look like a sea of constantly-moving shadows.

"Come on Quistis. Maybe the Gang back there can't spot it but I can see it clear as day."

There's a saying from Balamb that Cid told me once; you need to make sure your feet lie on solid ground if you want to have your head high up in the clouds. When we were drinking once Xu had told a much shorter, more brutal one from her hometown of Dollet; a blade without a handle will only cut your fingers off. Cid had built Garden out of stratospheric ideals, and SeeD was a razor-sharp edge. Xu and her section of the organisation was the handle, the feet. She and her silent staff kept the Garden and its machinery flowing smoothly while the rest of us were off fighting for those grand ideals Cid liked to talk about. I'd known her since we had both started SeeD at roughly the same age and we'd kept that friendship even though our paths had split apart almost immediately, me to the front-line and her something more silent. I was almost as close to her as the adopted family I'd left behind in the ballroom. "I'm just a little tired is all," I said as we entered the darkened concourse. At night Garden was practically empty, only those on punishment detail and Garden staff walking the halls.

She didn't buy it, not for a second. "Then by the way you've been acting you've been tired for weeks. You barely cared that we signed this treaty today Quistis. You didn't seem to care about the party afterwards. You certainly don't look like you care why we're out here tonight now." She stopped mid-stride to look at me, arms crossed like an instructor at a hesitant pupil. "This isn't you."

I knew she was right but…no. There was no 'but'. She was right. I didn't care, and I hated myself for it. I sat down on one of the benches that lined the curving walkways and looked up at her. "I can't feel it anymore."

"Feel what?"

I held out a hand and tried to find the power there, but as usual there was nothing. Where there should have been blue light dancing on my palm there was just the cold breeze of Garden's processed air. Xu looked confused for a second, and then… "Oh." She tapped a hand against her arm. "Since when?"

"Since the beach." I didn't have to tell her which one.

"That wasn't your fault," Xu said instantly. "If anyone was to blame it was Galbadia. Again." That was a sore point for her, as it was for me.

I waved the raised hand at her; _I know I know_. I'd heard it before, from Cid and Xu. Certainly none of us had been to blame. But the blood had still washed across my hands and nobody else's. "Since then I've felt nothing." In more ways than one. Suddenly the dam cracked, just a little, and without knowing how I got there I was staring down at the floor with my head in my hands. When I spoke there was a crack in my voice I detested but couldn't smooth out. "God Xu, I don't feel anything."

I felt like a wretched creature.

Xu sat down next to me on the bench. She didn't put her arm around me, she knew I'd hate pity like that. Always too proud for my own good. "You know what? You need to get away from here," she said.

"I tried that," I said bitterly.

"I mean really away, not just outside these walls. Away from SeeD."

"How?" I asked, not expecting an answer. I'd thought about it a couple of times. Thought about just handing papers and _leaving._ But I knew I'd be running away from Garden, not running to someplace else. I'd joined so young I couldn't even remember anything before SeeD and Balamb anymore. This place was my home. I'd never even gotten to the stage of asked for the retirement forms.

Xu could read my thoughts like I was an open book. "There's a way." She reached into her jacket and took out a small datapad. "This came in today. Not a mission." She handed it to me. "Don't look at this tonight. Go and sleep, I'll clear your schedule for tomorrow. If I was a believer in Hyne I'd swear to Him Quistis you look like you need it. Take a look at that and get back to me in the afternoon alright. I see you awake before noon I'll frog-march you back into your apartment and tranq you to sleep."

I grabbed it as we both stood. For a second neither of us moved, just two quiet statues in the semidarkness of the Garden. Then she stepped forward and hugged me, something she had never, ever done before. I was too shocked to respond.

She stepped away after a second and the emotion was gone again, only a small smile on her face. "Just…keep it together, alright? The world needs people like us to keep it from breaking down."

Assuming I could keep myself patched together in the meantime. I took her advice though. I tread the path from the concourse back to my SeeD apartment without stopping for anything, and I was asleep as soon as my head touched my pillow.

* * *

"Esthar?" I had no idea what to think of it.

Xu nodded as I handed back the datapad. "They've asked for us to send a team to look over their Rebirth plans. I was going to send one of Nida's groups but…" She didn't say anything else.

I was tempted. I loved Esthar. Ever since we'd first gone there during the War there had been something…pristine…about it that had just called out to me. Like a hothouse flower locked away in its own little world and left to bloom while the rest of the plants around it fought in the dirt. Not that the reality was anywhere near as rosy. A country ruled over by a mad sorceress that had bent the populace to her will and everything she had done to keep it under her control. After the War I had went back for a day with Squall and Rinoa, and Kiros had showed me the endless lists of missing and lost from her reign. For all that though President Loire was doing his best to turn the ideal of progress Esthar represented into a reality.

"It's overseeing the crews there, helping fix chaos the Pandora caused." Xu went on. "Rebuilding, re-housing, finding out what necessities are broken and fixing them up again, anything else Esthar needs to get back on its feet." God bless you Xu, you knew me well. "No treaties or arguing, just helping put things back together."

I smiled. "You didn't have to do this just for me-" I began, but was cut off.

"I know you, Quisty. I even think I know what your problem really is." I doubted that but stayed quiet. "Just get away from these noisy brats that like to play at soldiers, go somewhere with people who actually want your help." She scribbled something down on the datapad and tossed it back in my lap. A contract, signed and sealed, only needing the name of the dispatched SeeD. "Get away from here before it ends up breaking you."

I signed it, before I could think of any reason to stop myself. I handed it back and caught another rare smile from my old friend. "Two emotions in two days Xu, is that a record?" I teased her.

"Go be a smartass on another continent already."

* * *

"Only three days?" Squall asked as we stood on the platform. With the treaty just signed there would probably be a breather before one country accidentally insulted another, and the Commander found his workload eased a little. He'd insisted on seeing me off. "Thought you'd be staying longer."

"You know how it is," I replied non-committedly. "Always some other place to be."

"You sure you're alright?" he asked.

"They're sending someone over in an airship, if-"

He cut me off. "You know what I mean Quisty."

Quisty. Squall almost never called us by our old Orphanage names. "Am I really so transparent?" I asked, almost a whisper. God, what if everyone knew? I thought I'd been keeping myself together so well.

"Only if you're watching closely," he replied.

We stood there together in silence for a minute, as above us a pale green dot shimmered into the distance, and began to grow. Not the _Ragnarok_ then, one of the smaller models. "You should go and see Rinoa," I said suddenly. Squall just shrugged. I resisted the urge to sigh at him. We were both too old for that now. "I know you miss her. Just take a SeeD boat and go to Timber_. _Call it diplomatic exchanges or something. You think anybody will care?"

Squall didn't look at me, just kept his eyes on the approaching airship, and I knew he was thinking just that. Why he didn't go I had no idea, and I wondered if something else lay underneath his hesitance. I risked a glance down at his hands clasped in front of him and saw him rubbing his finger, the one with the ring on under the glove. Maybe it was just none of my business, but somehow Squall would always be my little brother. "Maybe I will." He turned and smiled. "Thanks."

I couldn't reply, the roar of the engines slamming the air around us like a hurricane as the _Hrist_ touched-down on the Garden's outskirts. A few students were taking pictures from the windows as the door slid aside to reveal a man in the shining white dress uniform of Esthar's military. I picked up my bags and crossed the black tarmac, already hot from the engine-wash. "Take care of the place while I'm gone!" I shouted at my errant Commander and family.

Squall waved. "Take care of _yourself_ while you're over there!" he shouted at me, as the door slid shut, and the light of the sun and green fields of Balamb were blocked out by the solid steel Esthar technology.

"Ready to go ma'am?" the gleaming soldier asked.

I smiled, and it was almost genuine. "Whenever you're ready." I felt the lift-off seconds later, and the roar of the engines beneath me turned into a thin hum as the craft turned, and headed back home with me in it. I could have sworn there was a slight pull for just a moment as we started moving, like some thin wire snapping as I left. Or hands losing their grip on me.

I went east.


	3. Wretched

"I know you."

"I'm pretty sure you don't, friend."

"Sure I do."

Every time. Absolutely every single god-damn time. I put my glass down so I have both hands free. Not that I'd need both to deal with this guy if he goes for it. Some half-drunk two-bit nobody looking to make a name for himself wouldn't even make me break a sweat. "You're mistaken. Why don't you sit back down and finish your drink?" I turn away and hope that will be the end of it. It never is.

I see something flicker from the corner of my eye, but I'm already up and away and his fist goes through air. He's slurring the usual crap they all do and I wonder which side he fought on. He looks old enough. Talk about your sins coming back to haunt you. I keep an eye on his buddy as both of them come at me across the dark bar, and I decide _hell with it._ I have no reason to stay here. No reason to keep this clean then. I grab my glass back up and throw it as hard as I can, right into the second guy's face. For a second he looks puzzled as his face explodes in red, then he's collapsing to his knees and making a noise like a stuck pig. His drinking pal with the big mouth tries to swing at me again with the same result and I just step back. Nobody else is coming for me I can say, they're all sat back and watching how it goes down. Whichever of us wins they'll go back to their drinks like they do every time a fight breaks out in this sleazy piece of crap bar and drink it out of their memory.

He shouts something like _fuckin' killer – _well that doesn't narrow his problem with down by much – and gets the same idea as me, except it takes him a couple of swipes to find a clean glass. He swings it, big and slow and so stupid, and I catch it and just squeeze. He shouts in pain and drops it into my other hand's palm waiting below his. Then I hit him with it. The side of the head, nothing fatal. A bar fight they'll ignore but not a murder. I stand there for a second and I can feel a slight weight in my chest as I breathe. Maybe I'm a little rustier than I was but at this point it hardly matters. I reach into the unconscious drunk's shirt and bring out his wallet, throw a few notes onto the table. For a second I think about sitting back down and finishing my drink but suddenly I don't have the taste for sitting in an awful bar drinking half-watered beer. Screw it.

I walk out of there and into the sunlight without a word, their eyes on my back as I go.

* * *

I don't like Fisherman's Horizon. No matter how many people there are on the streets it always feels empty, like a place that died decades ago and the people living here just haven't noticed so they don't bother leaving. I come here anyway, it's the last place I can reliably put my head down without being woken up in the middle of the night because of bottles thrown against my windows. They'll stare at me and give me angry looks in the street but their precious pacifist state won't let them do anything else about it, drunken assholes on the outskirts of the city notwithstanding. I wipe my hands clean of the grime on the cheap clothing I'm wearing and I'm about to walk off when-

"Did…did you get it?"

Hyne spare me. I've been back in town for maybe a half-day and she's here already? I don't sigh. She's paying me after all, even if it's a pittance compared to what I used to make. Could have made if I'd- No. I'm not going there. "Yeah." I hand over the photograph. This is what I'm doing now. Cheap jobs for cheap people, with cheaper pay. I keep my hand out after I've given her what she wants.

"About the money, I…" she starts and this time I really do sigh. I half-expect her to make some excuse about _her_ paycheque, or a stopped card, or something, but it's not quite as bad as that at least. "I didn't expect you back so soon, I've not got the money out. If you give me an hour or so to…" She trails off.

"Fine." I wave it off. At least she's still going to pay me, and I _am_ back pretty soon I guess. Considering her husband was stupid enough to think the greasy hotel less than ten miles from the city was a good hiding place for his affairs though I don't see how long it could have taken. God I hate this town. I trail her as we walk down the empty streets. There's even less people here than normal somehow, the entire place is a ghost-town in the mornings.

Like everything else when we get there the cashpoint looks barely-used but at the same time grubby and second-hand, like it had been torn from a wall in Galbadia or Dollet and installed here instead. I can feel my impatience bubbling up as she plays around with the buttons until finally I can't stand it anymore. I sigh again – some days it seems I do it more than I breathe regularly – and walk up so I'm directly behind her. "Maybe if you just-"

Pain explodes behind my eyes and everything shakes. It feels like the world just turned upside down and slapped me with a giant stone pillar. I can feel some enormous weight on my head and I stumble back as my old training tells me _you're being hit_ as it comes again from the side, and the dodge I was going for turns into a trip. Apparently the dumb bastard who didn't manage to knock me out with the first blow wasn't expecting it either because the third one just brushes off my skull, even if it still hurts like hell. It gives me a second, and that's all I need.

"Goddamn hard-headed…" Mr Unfortunate says as I stumble up and try to will the blurring out of from my vision. I turn and get a blurry look at whoever the hell it is has decided to screw with me and he's huge. My vision is a mess and I can tell at least that much. I'm about to shout for the woman to get away somewhere when I hear a second voice.

"…told you he was tougher than that. Now…"

Of course. It's the woman's voice. Goddamnit. I've been played. I've been played and I feel like such an idiot as my vision stabilises into normality and the hulking brute in front of me is joined by the woman, her body-language no longer saying _mousey jilted housewife_ and instead _soldier in a bad old dress_, which she probably is. "You've made a huge mistake," I say, and try to mean it.

Lunkhead just sniggers and hefts the blackjack in his hand. I feel insulted that's all he brought. It's the woman who speaks though and now that she isn't keeping her voice quiet and scared I can hear that she isn't from anywhere near Fisherman's Horizon. "This will go a lot easier if you just come with us," she says in a thick accent I can't quite place. Bounty hunters, broke soldiers looking for an easy payday, doesn't matter to me now. My head's still ringing a bit and if I can't intimidate them into backing off I don't know if my feet will move fast enough to-

He goes for it, some signal I missed while I was too busy thinking to just _watch_. Damnit, this never happened before. He brings down the cosh in a huge arc only a moron would miss, but I already know I'm meant to see it as the woman comes around from the side with something sharp in her hand, the real attack to his diversion. I catch her arm before it can bury a knife into my leg and twist myself around, carrying her with me and together we stumble sideways into her muscle or partner or whatever he is, and I throw my free elbow as hard as I can into his stomach, twisting my elbow in his chest and my hand grabbing her arm. For a moment we all struggle there ungraciously in an amateurish mess until finally I get purchase with both my feet, and I _pull_ upwards as hard as I can and stamp down with my free foot. My reward is a sharp _crack_ and cry of pain and a hiss of drawn-out breath as her arm breaks at the same time as his ribs. For a second I gloat as both of them collapse to the ground, just one more pair would-be claimants on whichever bounty they were dumb enough to accept on me.

My joy doesn't last long though, because a second later I hear the whistle and the sound of iron-toed footsteps on the pavement. For a second I consider running but the cops already have me in their sights. I hear a chuckle from below me and I look down at the woman, holding one arm in the other but staring up at me from the ground with a nasty smile. "The hell are you so happy about?" I ask.

"We wanted…the money. Guess I can wait…'till you're out," she gasps through the pain of a broken arm.

I snort in derision. "You're out of your mind if you think you're going to-" She starts laughing and I stop talking as I realise what she means. The blackjack and the knife are already on the ground, kicked away from them during the fight, and I'm almost untouched while they're both on he ground with broken bones.

_Aww shit…_

As the cop comes over and begins to shout at me I wonder how far any explanation would get me. Whether they'll even bother to hear my side of the story when that side starts with 'My name is Seifer Almasy and I was attacked…".

The handcuffs snap around my arms before I can even get a word out, and the ambulance for the two unfortunates beneath me comes soon after.

I hate it when I'm right.

* * *

I know the man I'm looking at of course. He's been angling for this for months now, the bastard, and now here I am wrapped up and put on his doorstep. I shift my hands behind my back to try and shift the pain from the too-tight plastic cuffs but all that does is make them bite on a different part of my wrists.

"So you finally screwed up huh?"

The guard-chief in Fisherman's Horizon has a Galbadian accent so thick you could cut meat with it, so that's no huge mystery why he wants me locked up. He may have good reason to hate me but I don't care. "I don't know what you're talking about. I'm the victim here."

"Sure you are. Just a huge misunderstanding I find you over two people with a broken arm and a smashed face."

"They attacked me, I was defending myself."

It's all a huge game. He knows he's going to get what he wants and he's so smug I want to reach across this table and punch him, but I think I'd slit my wrists trying against these damn cuffs. "What reason would two tourists have to attack you?"

"They were bounty hunters you dumb asshole. They had weapon s_right there_ on the ground when your wind-up policeman arrested me." He keeps that same shit-eating smile on as he slides a sheet of paper towards me. I catch the first line and see _here for our honeymoon when we were attacked…,_ before he takes it back. They might have been shit fighters but they weren't stupid I guess.

"_Guests _of Fisherman's Horizon, now in the hospital because of injuries you inflicted when you tried to rob them-"

"This is so much horseshit-"

"_After_ you assaulted _another_ two men in a bar." I keep my mouth clamped shut like a vice, not trusting myself to speak. "What, nothing to say about this one Almasy?" The bitter old fuck just smiles as he taps the papers like they're some kind of holy writ. Which they may as well be. "I don't think we need to waste each other's time here asking for a confession."

"As if you'd ever get one out of me," I snort, and finally get a chance to smile back as the man's face turns red. It's not much but it's the little victories these days. Rough hands grab me from behind and haul me up, and suddenly my hands are blazing with pain as the plastic cuffs bite into my arms hard enough to make a wrenching sound I don't like much.

"Come on you asshole," one of the interchangeable guards snarls as he hauls me out of the interrogation room and drags me back towards the cage, still full of petty thieves and drunks. "Enjoy your friends before we haul our ass out for good."

For good? What… "What the hell are you babbling about now?" I ask as the cage slams shut with a _clang_ of metal bars and locks, leaving me inside with the other broken creatures this stupid half-dead town likes to throw up in lieu of real criminals.

The guard doesn't smile. There's no real malice there, not like with his chief. Just one more warm body in the system that's devoured countless people before me and probably a whole lot to come. "You ain't staying here," he says. "Nonresident-s and crimes against - get shuffled outta FH and tried elsewhere."

My stomach churns for just a minute and I hammer on the bars with a fist as he walks off. "_HEY!"_ He turns back. "You know who I am, right?"

"Yeah," he says, and there's nothing in the word. He just doesn't care and it infuriates me. Once I had half the world at my feet and now this entry-level guard doesn't even give a shit about who he's arresting.

"So where's that for me, goddamnit!?"

The nameless jailer just shrugs. "Your two joes, the girl with the broken arm and the man with the busted ribs? Wherever they were from." He turns and walks off and I sit down on the dank bench at the back of the cell, hauling off the drunk loser that was sitting there. My stomach's churning and I snarl to keep the vomit down. This is trouble, this is big trouble. I think back to the fight against the pair and try to remember every detail. It takes a second but I can remember that thick accent easily, and I wonder why I didn't place it before. That slight musical twang that you don't quite hear anywhere else in the world and the soft r's they never seem to get quite right. I won't have to wonder about how the trial will go at least, because in _that_ place, against _me_, there's only one direction it'll take.

My foot starts tapping on the stone floor of the lockup and I have to will myself to keep it steady. At least I won't be staying here long I guess. I'll soon be vacating it for a much cleaner one. No matter how clean they keep them though it'll still be a cell, even if it's the nicest, most advanced cell in all the world.

Adel built so many of them, and Esthar hates to throw anything useful away.

* * *

-x-

Welcome to a new tale. Unlike my previous works the update schedule for this one will probably be a little irregular, as I'm actually a sucker for punishment and am working on two long-form stories right now (check the Warcraft fandom for the other, I promise you don't have to be a WoW-player to enjoy it!). No doubt spelling and grammar errors will have snuck their way past me because of this and so if anyone else feels like a little proof-reading in exchange for early access to chapters just throw me a line.

Comments and reviews are welcome as ever. Hope you enjoy!

~Cobray


	4. Golden Chains

I swept the sand and salt out of my hair as I looked down on the crew I was with, comparing the notes the dig-leader had given me with the old drawings of what the place should have looked like. I leaned over the railing. "Try the north-west!" The foreman nodded and gave a thumbs-up, and the workers standing idle around the site exploded into action.

_Welcome back. We have a lot of work to do._

Kiros had met me on the landing pad, no formal greeting or ceremony, and those had been the first words out of his mouth. A month had passed and I'd realised there hadn't been time for anything else. We'd seen each other maybe twice since then, paths crossing like migratory swarms as we moved across the country trying to reverse or at least uncover the effects that two Sorcerous Wars had had on the huge salt-covered continent. Finding out what Galbadia had broken and laying the groundwork to fix it was the easy half. Adel's tyrannical reign hadn't pulled down any buildings or smashed any defences to ribbons, but the damages she had done were much more subtle, but so much worse. We crossed the country fixing what was broken, and more than once we came across sealed rooms full of old bones. When we did so old men would move past us solemnly and take out the remains of the dead that Adel had purged when she came to power.

"Another one bites the dust," a voice said behind me as a far-off _boom_ sounded from the wreckage below us. The remains of the housing block crushed by the passage of the Lunatic Pandora all those years ago came down in pieces, ready to be swept away by the crews that followed ours around the country like faithful hounds. After that would be another, with cranes and bonds and steel instead of dismantling machines to put it all back together again as a place could live.

"Another one down, hundreds to go," I replied to the earnest young volunteer. They were all volunteers out here, Kiros heading up the Estharian regular army repairing the complex skyscrapers and arcologies of the techno-city itself while I re-assembled the outskirts. I could see in my mind the endless miles of broken city still to be replaced. After that there would be the research buildings and institutes, the moon-cannon and the Tear's Point facility, all smashed to ribbons.

_We won't stop there,_ Laguna had said as he laid it all out before us in the presidential palace, a huge map of the continent projected across the floor. _We'll make Esthar green again._ I'd sat there sipping some Estharian drink I couldn't pronounce and wondered how serious he was. Now I knew. Odine was already out there somewhere, the tiny little genius taking samples and measurements, demanding machinery and men whenever our paths crossed.

I loved it. I looked forward to the next town we'd rebuild. I wanted to walk in Esthar city again like we had during the Third War when it was clean and perfect. I wanted to be there when the dead plains started sprouting life. I could have kissed Xu if she had been here and not back in Balamb, helping keep SeeD on the rails. At the start I'd reported in at the end of every day, sending reports over the airwaves every night before I collapsed into sleep. Then every other day. Now I did it once or twice a week. Balamb and Galbadia seemed like another world, one so far away it couldn't reach out and touch me here on the white plains.

"Ready to move on Ms Trepe?"

The wind picked up and I smiled as I brushed a stray hair from my face. I'd gotten tired of my old bangs, and in the end I just tied the whole thing back in a ponytail. Sometimes I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered who this other person was staring back. I'd thrown off my old SeeD uniform and Balamb's tropical clothing for something that better suited the desert-like country. Now I dressed in pale colours and whites to keep the heat from overwhelming me, loose clothing and a scarf to keep the sand-covered winds out. Looking at myself now I looked nothing like someone from Balamb, more like a native of Esthar. The thought didn't bother me so much either. "Sure."

For the first time for as long as I could remember I was content. It was like all of the chains and hooks that had dragged me down back at Garden had been left behind when the airship took off, and now all I could feel on my back was the cool breeze coming in from the sea to the west. I felt free.

Of course, it couldn't last.

* * *

"Ms Trepe?"

"Call me Quistis, Gleny," I told the teenager as he approached me, even as I knew he'd ignore me. We'd worked together for weeks but he'd always been a little tongue-tied around me. He just shook his head as he held out his hand.

"You should hear this first," the boy said nervously as he handed me the small handset for our group's satellite communicator. Ever since the War had ended and Adel's tomb had been destroyed I'd learned to love that tiny little device.

I took it without another word, wondering what had the young man so nervous. "Hello?"

"_Quistis?"_ Well, that explained the man's attitude alright. Not often a research undergrad would talk with the right-hand man of the country's leader.

I smiled. "What can I do for you, councillor?" I covered the mouthpiece and looked at Gleny. "I need a few minutes alone. Go see if the others need some help, okay?" He just nodded and nearly _ran_ off as I turned back to the phone, the wind billowing outside the small tent we'd set up. "How's the north treating you Kiros?"

"_That's not something I want to talk about,"_ the man replied, and I could hear something in his voice that I'd only ever heard once before, back during the War. He was angry about something, but… "_Listen, can you come back to the city for a few days?"_

"Hold on a second." I pushed aside the tent flap and looked over the next site on our list. It had been some kind of town in the past, with a huge multi-story building in the centre, most likely a community gathering point. Now half of the short skyscraper lay by the side of the lower half in pieces. It must have been sheared straight off when the Pandora had floated implacably through it, and everything around it was ruined and deserted. "How's it look?" I ask my young protégé.

Gleny tears his eyes away from his binoculars and shrugs. "Like a lot of big buildings fell down all at once. No factories or plants or anything like that though by these maps, we shouldn't need any of the special stuff." The last trailer in our expedition is full to the brim with sealsuits, chemical-resistant gear and anything else a normal human would need to survive wading through a broken building that had held the post-exotic and dangerous materials Esthar used to make technological miracles. Everyone hated wearing it with a burning passion, me included.

I tapped my finger against the tent-pole for a second, and made up my mind. "Hold the fort for a couple of days alright? I need to get back to the city." There was a small two-person rover inside one of the caravans, it seemed perfect.

"Really, but…" Gleny trailed off.

"I know you'll do a great job," I said, and waited for it to take effect.

It did. A small blush went around his cheeks and the young man – sixteen if he was a day – coughed and tried to hide it. I smiled, just a little. Whatever dream he was clearly holding in his little heart would have to come to a screeching halt, at least for now. "If you say so ma'am. I…that is to say…"

I put the phone back to my ear. "See you in a couple of days Kiros."

"_I'll be waiting,"_ the man's tinny voice came back through.

I looked out over the salt plains, my hood half-up to keep the sands out of my hair. The place had been like this for centuries now, turned from whatever it had been before into this wasteland by whatever failed madness or war Esthar had attempted before living memory. Now here we were, a thousand of us if that, trying to bring life back to it. Laguna had plans in his head for more, and the ever since I had gotten here the more I'd thought about it the more I wanted to be here to see it happen. Wanted it desperately. Checking to see Gleny and the others were already getting to work on the site I climbed the top of the hill and looked out over the plains.

_We'll turn it green again._

I raised my arms to the air and stood there for a moment, letting the sand and sun and wind wash across me. Without conscious thought I took the band from my hair and let it stream around me in a cascade, like everything else the blonde hair changing in the ever-above light and heat into something paler. I could feel the land underneath my feet in the soft slippers we wore in the convoy trucks, shifting earth and sand and rocks. I smiled. A living thing turned into a dead nothingness by ill treatment and the scars of battle, now preparing to bloom again into something new and spectacular. It felt symbolic.

It felt like rebirth.

* * *

"Every time I see you, you look different."

"Some days I can't believe it myself," I said to Kiros as we shook hands. The councillor for the president of Esthar had come to the loading docks himself, dressed in something halfway between Estharian government robes and a Galbadian uniform. The man had acclimatised to his new life as well as he could but some part of him would always be a rank-and-file Galbadian soldier. We would meet every few times when some SeeD excursion came within sight of the great city, or some greater political problem made Esthar lumber out of its now half-hearted solitude. I liked Kiros, a lot.

"How's it going out there?"

He looked nervous, or at least bored. "We've been getting your reports, some days it's all the man reads." He meant Laguna of course.

"You should come out and take a look. A lot's changing out there."

"Believe me I'd love to," Kiros replied, "but right now I'm stuck here dealing with…well, you'll see."

On one hand I could understand him. Kiros was an outdoorsman and only his loyalty to Laguna kept him inside the city. On the other I don't see how you could get bored with a place like this. We rode one of the lightways through the city, a comfortable seat and warm air as we sped across the huge metropolis. I watched the scenery speed by, tall steel and glass that gleamed in blues and whites like slabs of diamond pushed into the salt, people and smaller homes and buildings springing up against them like flowers against an aquifer. I manage to drag myself away from the scenery rushing by long enough to sit down. "What's happening, Kiros?" I asked.

"I'd rather talk once we get back to the presidential palace," Kiros said simply. I just stared at him for a second before turning to sit back down. The rest of the ride went in silence until the teacup-shaped vehicle shifted sideways slightly as it went off the main lightway system and onto the one leading up to the palace that had once housed Adel and now held her exact opposite.

I got out first and took my chance, reaching down to help Kiros from the craft. "Is it trouble?" I asked as I brushed the last of the sand and dust from my clothes and scarf, and turned to stare up at the massive building before us. It was a magnificent place. Even Centra in the height of its power couldn't have built something like this. "At least tell me that."

Together we stood there on the edge of Esthar's power, just two old comrades staring up at the towering edifice. Kiros Seagill was one of the most taciturn men I'd ever met. Even during the Third War when we had finally met in person and not through some magical dream-world he'd always kept his cool even as the world warped and twisted around him, a calm voice and presence around his optimistic dreamer of a superior. Five years had passed since then and only a few extra lines on his face showed any difference. It was there nonetheless. Maybe it wasn't the same darkness that had gripped me like a vice in Balamb, but I could tell Kiros was going through something. Maybe even something similar. He looked tired.

"Yeah, it's trouble. I'll let him explain when we get inside."

"Laguna?" I asked as the doors slid open and the warm air of the city shifted to the air-conditioned interior of the massive administration building.

Kiros shook his head. "No. Irvine."

I stopped dead in my tracks. Something inside my shifted, just a little. A small crack. "What?" I asked dumbfounded and then recovered myself. "Irvine's here?" For a second the man pulls ahead of me as my feet are frozen to the ground. Suddenly the path ahead into the palace looks just a little darker, and it takes effort to make the step to catch up with him.

"Like I said," Kiros said. "I'll let him talk."

I don't say anything as we both walk on through the maze of corridors and elevators into the depths of Esthar's heart. All I can think of is the endless white plains I'm leaving behind, and the wind blowing across it that promised so much.

All good things come to an end.

* * *

"God Quisty it's great to see you again. I'd stand and hug you but…"

But he couldn't. Almost all of Irvine Kinneas' entire right side was covered head-to-toe in white bandages, wires and other Esthar medical equipment I couldn't even guess at. A stern looking girl in what I could only assume was a nurse's uniform stood behind the cowboy's wheelchair and tried her best not to frown at us.

"You need to stay calm Mr Kinneas, remember what-"

"Remember what the doctor said yes I _know_ already, you- Ow!" Irvine grimaced as the nurse's hand bounced off his cast.

"Don't be rude."

He looked up at me with his best puppy-dog eyes. "You see what I've had to put up with?"

I just gawped for a second, and then I got my thoughts in order. "Irvine, what _happened_ to you?"

I'd been shocked, totally. The door to the small rook had simply opened and Irvine had been on the other side of it. For a second my heart had almost fled from my chest until I got it back under control and locked my worry and panic back down inside my heart. With all the rest of it. Irvine just shrugged with his good arm, and I rounded on Kiros. "What in Hyne's name have you been up to?"

"Not his fault," Irvine said quickly.

"I'll decide that," I snapped before I could stop myself.

Kiros was unfazed at my outburst. "We had a contract," the black man said, and gestured over at the nurse. "If you would?"

"Yessir," the girl said, and walked out of the room without another sound. As the door opened she stopped in her tracks and half-gasped, and I watched as she stepped aside as fast as she could to let the person on the other side in.

I made damn sure my anger was locked down _tight_ this time before I spoke. "Mr president."

"Heya Quistis," Laguna Loire said as he walked in. "Thanks for coming, and call me Laguna okay?"

Maybe under other circumstances I would have. Laguna Loire was the most disarming man I knew. But something else was going on here, something that had me feeling like with every step I took I was walking into a wall of steel that only _just_ withdrew as I moved forward. I felt a hand on my arm and looked down at Irvine.

"Hey, hear them out alright?" he asked.

I sighed and sat down on one of the empty chairs in the small room. The door behind us had shut, leaving Laguna's security on the other side. Two Estharian politicians and two SeeDs. I felt my skin crawl. "What can I do for you Laguna?"

SCENE BREAK

"We've been having trouble up north, in one of the Newstates."

"Which one?" I asked.

Kiros tapped the screen with a finger and the map of the world suddenly zoomed with dizzying speed, until all that was shown was the snow and ice of northern Trabia. "We have a standing agreement with Havensden." I didn't like the sound of that, but I stayed quiet as the man went on. "We supply them with the occasional thing they need and can't make yet, mainly heavy-duty cold-weather machinery, and in exchange we get a nice handshake and free drinks whenever we go up there."

I caught Irvine's eye, and his mouth twitched upward in a smile. Politics didn't work like that. Kiros was leaving something out there and we both knew it. "Where's the problem come in?"

"Recently whatever we sent up there has been…intercepted."

"Are you sure? Trabia is a harsh place Kiros, they might just be getting caught by the weather, or storms, or avalan…" I stopped talking when I saw Kiros shake his head.

"That's what we thought, until our first aircraft were guided to the wrong base and everyone on board robbed blind. We haven't found her yet."

"You've lost a _ship?"_ I sat back and thought for a second. Then when I was done I looked across at Irvine. "This is where SeeD came in, I assume?"

"Yep!" Irvine replied, far more cheerfully than was appropriate for a man with half his body in bandages. "The contract came through for some defence with the next shipment, and I was up that week." He gestured with his one good arm. "Unfortunately it turned out I did little good."

I had to smile at that. "Poor boy, you've got no luck, do you?" I turned back to the two Galbadian-come-Estharian leaders. "If this is sabotage or you suspect one of the other nations is trying to shut down your operations I'm sure SeeD can provide a team to…" I saw the golden thread leading out of here and back out onto the plains. Even as I grabbed for it though it turned out to be just an illusion as Laguna shifted in his seat, and Kiros tried very hard not to catch my eye. "What?"

"The ships were brought down by SeeD, Quisty," Irvine said, voice barely a whisper.

"Impossible," I shot back instantly. I turned to Kiros. "I'm sorry but there's simply _no way_ that…"

"It's almost certainly the case," Laguna said, and I can hear a touch of sadness in his voice that twists my heart just a little bit. "It was a set-up, all the way."

I sat back, mind still just a little too crooked and slow from the endless white plains to take it all in as Kiros talked.

"The second aircraft didn't have any equipment in it, just SeeDs waiting to jump out at whatever was waiting for them when they landed. But the ship never made it to Havensden, it was shot down after it went into the mountains."

"_Shot down?_" Not much could take down an Estharian craft. The _Ragnarok_ had been able to plough through anything we'd thrown at her, including a meters-thick slab of iron and crystal called the Lunatic Pandora. I waved at Kiros as I tried to think of anything that could do that.

"A group attacked out of the snow. Mr Kinneas was the only survivor from either side. Irvine?"

"Sorry Quistis. We went down hard, we weren't in any state for an attack."

"Why SeeD?" I asked. "Why not one of your people?" I felt rotten for asking it but I felt like I had to. Even if Garden was fast losing its grip on my heart it was still my home. Someone had to defend the old girl."

"Only your people knew the flight-path," Kiros said. "And one other thing."

Silence reigned in the room for a moment, and I looked between the three men. I had the crystal-clear impression they were all hoping someone else would say it first. "What?"

Irvine was the one to break the three-way stalemate. "We messed up real bad."

"_How?"_

"We didn't know what we'd be facing, and we didn't have any room on the ship to bring the heavy artillery with us, so-"

"Don't tell me..."

"So we asked for permission from the Garden staff to-

I could have throttled the man, I absolutely could have. "You didn't..."

"-to authorise the use of a GF for the mission."

It all came into focus then, like dirt being cleared away from an old painting. "They took it?"

"Who else knows how to contain or transfer a GF, Quistis?" Laguna asked.

I put my head in my hands and cleared my eyes. I felt tired. I hadn't slept since getting Kiros' phone-call back at the camp on the plains and suddenly all the time since then dropped on my eyelids like a heavy weight. "Only Garden."

"And only _Balamb_ Garden," Kiros said.

"They had someone with them, a woman. The others were natives, hired help. But she was SeeD, I'd swear it. She got away from me," Irvine said, and I could hear tight anger in his voice. "She killed the others in her team to do it but she got away, and everyone else inside the transport was dead. The man we had with the GF was gone too and so was the GF, we-"

I didn't want to know. I didn't want to hear names or ranks. I wanted to crawl away and let this all be some insane nightmare. Xu had given me a lifeline to this place, to get away from Garden and SeeD and half-baked bandages to the world's problems and petty squabbles, and now I get here and find somehow those chains are already waiting for me when I arrive. "Why are you telling me all this?" I asked Kiros, and I hoped to Hyne he couldn't hear the pleading in my voice.

"Because you're the only ones we can trust," Laguna said simply. I knew what he meant of course. We were the Orphanage Gang. The heroes of the world. Beyond reproach or suspicion.

"I can't do anything from this goddamn chair. We need you Quisty," Irvine said.

For a second it was there, the half mad impulse to just throw it all off like the sand on my scarf and say _no._ Tell them to phone Squall or Selphie or Zell and get them to come over here, and go back out to my desert and let someone else deal with all this, someone who gave a damn. I looked at Irvine though and knew I could never do that, no matter how far I sunk down. I'd thought about it occasionally, and I was sure that Xu dreamt of it in her nightmares, but a rogue SeeD _could not_ be tolerated. So it would be me.

I took my days and weeks in that white-and-gold desert and locked it up. Put away the imaginary key and hoped it wouldn't just gather dust for all time as the memories of the wind in my hair, the sand under my feet and an endless horizon were shoved away and replaced with twenty years of SeeD training I'd only temporarily moved aside. It all slot back into place like it had never been away, like it knew my aborted attempt at another life would never succeed and had just been waiting for me to invite it back in. How depressing,

"Where do we start?"

It was there again, that half-second glance between the three and I know, I _know_ that they've already talked about something without me, something that all three of them know I won't like.

"I had an idea," Kiros said.

Here it came. "What?" Irvine shuffled a little bit in his wheelchair and even Laguna seemed to be avoiding looking at me, and I wondered how bad this could get.

"What if we could get someone inside their group?"

"Inside a terrorist cell? A _SeeD-led_ terrorist cell? Couldn't be done," I said. I'd thought the same thing half a minute ago and had discarded it. "If you can't trust SeeD all you have is the five of us in the Gang. Four. Sorry Irvine."

"I'll beat your ass when I'm all fixed up."

"Of course you will dear. Sorry Kiros but there's no way it would work. Even assuming I could find a recruiter they would run the second they saw me, and whoever they have leading them would bury themselves so deep we'd never find them. The same would go for the rest of the Gang. Maybe one of the SeeDs from Galbadia could do it, but if you can't trust _any_ of us…" I gestured in frustration. Kiros was just looking at me and I couldn't figure out what was going on behind his eyes. He looked…calculating.

"What if we had a SeeD we _could_ trust?" he asked.

"What?" Irvine and I said it at the same time, and I looked down to see him looking back up, and probably matching my expression.

"Someone with no possible connection to the renegades but with a story so good they would fall for it?"

I saw it then, and everything made an sense. Why they had all come on so softly-softly, why Irvine and Laguna had been so quiet and let Kiros take the point on this whole thing. It had been his idea all along and he had given me the story inch by inch so that by the time it came to this I didn't simply turn and walk out. The total bastard. "Absolutely not."

"But it could work?" he asked me back.

I shook my head and wondered how I could put it terms he would understand. "He would never do it. His motivations don't work like that."

"We could make him."

I stood back up and faced Kiros at eye-height. "Seifer doesn't operate like that. He's not just some angry mercenary. He has…" I searched for the words. "He has a vision of himself in his head," I settled on, "and something like this isn't anything like that image."

"We could make him," Kiros repeated.

"No, you couldn't," I replied.

Laguna coughed, and I looked around at him as he stood. "Actually in this case Quistis, I think we can."

I listened to him talk, and once or twice I turned to look at Irvine. The first time I did it the gunman looked confused and angry. The second time I looked he was listening intently. The third time I looked he nodded to Kiros. I sighed as I listened to the tall black puppet-master, and I knew he was right.

It could be made to work.


	5. Boxful of Anger

_Just take it day by day_ the instructors had said back in SeeD training for this kind of thing, from whatever old book _they_ had copied it from. God knows it sounded way too smart for half of them to have made up themselves.

_If escape is impossible, abandon your sense of time. Let there be no days to look back on and lament as lost. Think not of the days ahead to be spent in your confinement. Throw away the past and the future so that when your comrades come for you, your imprisonment shall be but a single day._

Nice phrase, but whichever asshole horse-riding general had made it he'd clearly never spent a day behind bars himself because that shit didn't work, not even a little bit. Maybe in a nice cool POW camp in a forest somewhere in Galbadia but sure as hell not in an Esthar prison, buried so deep in the ground any windows would show a nice view of the soil outside.

"Here. Careful now boy."

I felt something slip into my pocket and don't even turn around as the guy brushes past me. I stand and dump the rest of the slop they call food here into the dispenser – typical efficient Esthar, we'll probably be eating the contents of the thing in a week – and walk off, waiting until I'm out of sight of the main mess-hall before I put my hands into the pockets of these cheap scratchy nylon uniforms to check. The blade of the tiny shiv feels sharp against my skin. I don't dare give any sign of relief but as I'm going back to my cell I feel a little bit better that I have a weapon. For a second I wonder what they did with my gunblade, but I push that thought all the way out. _One day at a time._

The man's already back in the cell somehow by the time I reach it, looks up at me from behind one of the thousand interchangeable magazines he's always with. "You have a name in mind for that blade?"

I sit on the room's lone chair. "Nope. Insurance." Lying through my teeth but I don't care about that so much.

I need it. Need it badly. I came over the border in the Horizon's single cheap prison-van and they were already waiting there for me with a big goddamn smile and a pair of charged cuffs for my hands. After that all that was left was the long bureaucratic wait standing between me and here, and then there it was in front of me, a squat square building sitting in the plains way beyond the city. A steel box that sat underground like an iceberg, holding the other side to Esthar's clean-and-pleasant image. Wasn't even a day before they started.

_So, you're Almasy huh?_

A dozen guys in maybe six days., and all I had in my hands was the faint itch from calluses used to holding a gun or a sword and now only held the plastic forks they gave us at mealtimes. Fast-talking and my fists dealt with the first two guys who thought they could make a reputation from having my blood on their hands, but I saw the others waiting behind them, and one in particular…

"You know if you get caught using that on the man it'll be my ass too."

"Trust me, if he tries for me I'll make it's far away from this cell," I reply. This is what I'm reduced to now. Trading single-sentence conversations with criminals I have no choice but to butter up for favours, trading the few luxuries we're allowed down here for favours and something that barely feels like a weapon.

"Make sure you do." The man goes back to his magazine, an open box of cigarettes on his bunk. Outside he might barely qualify as a small-timer, the kind of gang SeeD rookies might accept a contract on if they were hard-up for funds or experience. Inside his luck and 'importing' route has him a king.

I can't stand this place. Blazing white lights every second of the day until shutdown, when everything becomes pitch-black and quiet as a grave. Nothing to do all day except browse the library and sit around talking, or fighting. As a pre-trial I don't even get the activities the other, real prisoners, get. I know, _I absolutely know_ that somewhere up in those giant towers in the city to the south my name's been flagged up on someone's desk, and now they have me they're not even thinking of letting me go.

Suddenly I can't stand it. Everything feels so small in here. At least outside I could see the sky, even if everyone underneath it hated me. "I'm goin' out."

"Whatever."

_One day at a time_, _one day at a time_, I tell myself as I stalk towards the only other open-space that'll be empty at this time of day. One day at a time, sure. But what happens if that day never ends?

* * *

In the end I don't know whether I wanted them to come or not, but they do anyway. It's not like anyone in this place is hard to find, especially not for him.

"Well well Almasy. Finally decided to grow a pair?"

_You have to be kidding._

Although if I didn't I suppose I was asking for it. The basketball court's been a ghost-town ever since I arrived, and although I'm not sure why I guess that blood-stain halfway up the seats might explain why. Hard wood underneath and no other entrance to the room wouldn't have helped either. I wonder if the guards on the cameras are watching, whether they've been paid off by the man or whether they just don't give a damn what happens to us down here, hundreds of feet underground.

"Elian. What do you want?"

The home-made knife in my pocket has a reassuring weight to it as the man and his two goons walk up, although I won't use it unless he really pushes it. If my shiftless cellmate is the prison merchant, Elian is the general. Staring across the court at me with his one good eye it's easy to see why. "Just here to play a little."

"Thought you didn't go in for games." I can feel it bubbling under my skin ready to burst out. Just throw out all the rules they loaded into me at SeeD, in Galbadia, in FH and just _do something._

The man smirks like he's thought of something funny. "Didn't say we were gonna be _playing."_

So that's it then. I turn and look at them. I've seen his backup around, even seen one fight. They're big and all muscle, the kind you get from pumping a lot of iron but not doing anything with it. Elian's different, he's thinner, more tense, like me. An ex-soldier maybe. Whatever, I don't care. "What, you needed help for this?" I'm on the tips of my toes and just waiting for him now. Whether he needs to work himself up for it or just wants to taunt me, he…

"What's going on in here?"

All three of them turn at the same time, fighting stances dropped like puppets with their strings cut as the guard walks in, all white-clad Esthar uniform, one of a hundred that walk through the huge prison and make sure we're not lessening the population on our own initiative.

"Just wanted to play a little game sir," Elian says, the goddamn picture of innocent puzzlement.

The guard doesn't buy it for a second but there's nothing he can do, and everyone knows it. He twists his head to look past the three bastards and catches my eye. "Almasy. You're wanted. Admin."

For a second the puzzlement is real, at least for me. Then it's gone and hope begins to worm its way up from the depths of my soul I'd sealed it away in. Elian looks back at me and there's undisguised fury there, too much to account for a man simply looking to cement his place at the top by killing Seifer Almasy, and I wonder whether there's another story there. A lost relative or home maybe.

"The hell are you waiting for Almasy? _Now."_

The guard turns around for me for a split-second, and the second his eyes are off me I reach into my pocket and _hurl_ the shiv I paid so much for out into the bleachers as hard and as fast as I can before he looks back around. Elian catches the motion even if the guard doesn't and that fury's edged with pleasure now. if I come back from the Admin wing still with this uniform wing on the knife'll be gone and I'll be in some trouble. I walk past them both as calm as I can and wonder if Esthar is about to dump another sheaf of papers and misery on my head, or they have something worse planned for me than to rot away for the next six decades in their metal box in the ground.

They wouldn't even need to buy a coffin.

* * *

"What trouble am I in now?"

"The hell should I know?"

I don't respond as we walk through the halls. Pictures of mountains and forests and fake windows on the walls might fool the average prisoner but I can feel the weight of the earth around us as we leave the lockup wings and out into the administration halls, where the blazing white is replaced by actual colours, and the air is fresh instead of recirculated. We go past a few rooms and every person inside catches my eye. The usual reactions I've come to expect. Surprise and a little fear. Hatred and pleasure at seeing me escorted by a guard, in handcuffs. Finally the one I hate most, the ones who don't even glance down at me, or catch my eye and show nothing. The ones who don't even care.

"Here. Stay put."

The guard shoves us into a room through a door that looks like any other. It's an interrogation room, and I wonder what it is they think they know. Whether they want something from me. The little spark comes alive again at that but I ignore it.

The room isn't soundproofed because I can hear them approaching. A couple of men and a woman, coming in from the opposite door to the one and the guard and I came in from. From outside the prison. The spark is there now, and real. I try and lean back in the stiff metal chair but the best I can do is an uncomfortable shift as the door opens.

I'm not shocked, not even a little bit. I knew it would be him or someone like him. I hunt in my head for the best amused drawl as the three walk in. "Well, come to see your prize?"

Kiros site down opposite as the other two sets of footsteps come into the room as well. Somebody in a uniform with enough bells and whistles that he can only be the prison warden, and a tall platinum-blonde woman in Esthar slacks I didn't know but after a month of being surrounded by the shallow end of the gene pool I'd have happily stared at for hours if she hadn't been glaring daggers at me. "Almasy."

"Should have guessed you'd have something to do with all this, Seagill."

Kiros sat down opposite me, the warden staying near the door and the woman leaned against the wall behind him. "You'd be right," he said, and I wanted to punch him right in his smug goddamn face. I wouldn't give him the pleasure of another charge to lay on me though.

"So why are you here? Come to gloat? Read out your little lists? Tell me when you're going to send me down the river?"

He didn't rise for it though. "You're _already_ down the river Seifer, and we have your paddle." The black man tuned to the fat asshole behind me, still hanging back as though any second now I'd leap up and make a grab for him. "Warden, can you give us a few minutes? And leave the keys, if you would?"

"He's a dangerous prisoner sir, if…"

I just watched as Kiros turned around and fixed the fat man with a blank gaze. I tried not to smile as the man handed them over without another word, and slammed the door shut on his way out. "Nice. Got them dancing to your tune I see." Something was going on here, I knew it.

"Dancing well enough to keep you in this prison as long as I like, Almasy," Kiros said, and I could hear it in his voice, that tight hatred that didn't say _Esthar politician _at all, but instead _Galbadian soldier._ You could take the man out of the city, but… "We have it set up well enough you know, we made damn sure of that when the Third War ended. We can keep you caged the rest of your life. No trial, no fuss. Just another war criminal finally brought home."

"Bullshit. Loire wouldn't let you-"

"That's _President_ Loire you little shit," he shot back at me. "You think there's some bright-eyed scribe out there toiling away at getting you out of here? You're not _a_ war criminal Seifer, you're _the_ war criminal. You can stay here until you die of old age or a shank in the back and nobody would know or give a shit."

Five minutes and I was already willing to go and take my chances with that asshole back in the cells. But that little spark just wasn't going away, no matter how hard I stamped on it. "Well now you have that out of your system you must feel a hell of a lot better. So what do you want Kiros? Besides the chance to brag?" He just sat there in silence and I could practically see him grinding his teeth. Whatever he had he was having second thoughts about it. I looked over at the woman and met her gaze. "Well?"

"Another chance, Seifer. Although at this point it's tough to say whether you deserve it."

_No fucking way._

Kiros tapped his fingers on something on the table but I ignored him and looked at the woman again. I remembered that voice, remembered it so well. A hundred times in SeeD, a dozen times during the Third War, more than I could ever count far in the past. I tried to clean the surprise from my voice when I spoke, and almost managed it. "Undercover work, Trepe?"

Now I knew it was her I could see it. The set her body took when she was angry or annoyed shining through the change of clothes and hairstyle. "Do you really want to spend the rest of your life down here?"

I shrugged and tried to keep my calm, the little spark jumping up and down at her words. "What do you have for me?"

"A job," she said. "One you'd be uniquely suited for."

"What do I get out of it?"

"You think you're in a position to ask for _anything_?" Kiros' voice came out, but I wasn't paying attention to him, my eyes were both locked on hers. Every movement she made, every syllable, for tricks or lies or anything else that would explain _what the hell was going on._

"We have a problem in the north. A problem we can't solve on our own." A problem they couldn't just throw SeeDs at until it was fixed? "We need someone who can play a rebel convincingly. Someone-"

And there it was. I could guess the rest, and wondered exactly how bad it was. "Someone you can control." I grinned. "So how's your precious little world spinning out of control this time? Galbadia on the march again? Dollet finally grew a spine? Worse?" I got the reaction I wanted then. Kiros had a terrible poker face and it was written there plain as day. Hers was better but I knew her too well. The spark was a fire now, and I knew I could afford to stoke it. "What do I get in return?"

"A trial," Kiros said.

"Bullshit," I shot back before he could go on. I had my chance and I wasn't going to miss it. "A pardon."

"On these charges? You're kidding."

I looked up at Trepe and saw the slight hesitation on her face. That I could work with. "On bullshit charges. Two drunks and two bounty-hunters that took their swings and missed." I leaned back in the chair. "I walk from those a free man and I'll do your little clean-up work."

"Anything else?"

I met Kiros' eyes and didn't blink. "That and a ticket on the next train out of Esthar."

There was a smile there for maybe a fraction of a second. Maybe. "Done."

* * *

"Nothing you want to take out with you?" the the all-new Trepe asked as we left. I wasn't really listening to her though. I sucked down clean air for the first time in thirty days. I could see the car ahead of us and started walking towards it, ignoring the two people at my back. Leaving behind that goddamn box in the desert and all the small tiny people inside it felt more than good. It felt _right._

"Nothing I'll miss," I said as we all climbed inside and it began to speed off back to the city. "So what couldn't you tell me back there? Because no way you agreed to this for just some northern bandits."

"They're not just bandits. Whoever they are, they have help from somebody on the inside. Inside SeeD," Trepe said, and everything made sense.

I laughed, for the first time I don't remember how long. "Your white knights not quite so shining and spotless anymore then, Instructor?"

I was expecting some empty platitude or comeback, but I should have remembered how well she knew me. Trepe stared back at me, her expression completely blank as she spoke the exact words she knew would slice through me like a dagger into my soul:

"I think someone broke that image a long time ago, don't you Seifer?"

To that I had no reply. None at all.


	6. Departure

He hadn't changed, not even a little bit. The more I thought about it the more I realised I had been a fool for expecting him to.

"Well that was your biggest failure right there, out of many. Whose genius plan was it to send one of those things along in your bait-transport? Wasn't yours was it, cowboy?"

"It was Administrator Tyynes' idea."

"Xu, hah. I bet she's back in Balamb right now flagellating herself."

I just sat back and watched as the two skirmished, Seifer trying to get a rise out of Irvine as he tried to keep his cool. I suppressed a yawn and ran my hands across my eyes, trying to erase some of the tiredness I felt. One week since our sanctified prison-break and the only person to get any real rest was Seifer. I hadn't complained, I'd been locked in a foreign prison before, clean air and a bath was the least we had needed out of Galbadia. Then the grace period had ended and Kiros had told me it was time for the tame tiger to earn his keep. I just wished he'd show a little deference to his situation.

He rounded on me. "Didn't you ever develop some kind of tracking mechanism for those things, Instructor?"

_I'm not an Instructor anymore._ It was what he wanted me to say, so I didn't. "No." You can't place a tracking device on something incorporeal. You can't set devices to look for energy patterns when those patterns only appeared when the creatures were in the physical realm. It dug at me like a thin claw; whoever was hosting it now we would never find until it was too late. I didn't feel like explaining any of that too him however.

Seifer looked at the pages strewn on the long table we all sat at. The low lighting in the room was hurting my eyes but he seemed immune to it. Bolstered, if anything. "Which one was it?"

"Ifrit," Irvine replied. His chair was still on wheels, but the nurse that had been monitoring him he first time we met was gone now. She might have waited a couple of days just to make sure the extra stress wasn't going to slow down his recovery. Every time Irvine was in the same room as Seifer he was just that little jumpier, a little less laconic and relaxed. I didn't ask but I knew how he felt; a bird with clipped wings that had suddenly saw a cat enter the room.

"Shiva hates Ifrit. Can we grab her out of whatever hole you threw the GFs into and use her?" Seifer asked as he stared down at the pictures and reports on the white plastic table.

I glanced across at Kiros and saw him shake his head. It wasn't a response to him, but to me. I knew Kiros and Laguna had their plan and thought it was their best shot. To the tall black man all of this was just dragging our feet when we should have been headed north the second Seifer had been released. I knew better though. The deal we had struck was a fragile one and I think only I realised it; we would be leaving Seifer effectively on his own. Regardless of the promises we'd made he might bolt if he was shoved and forced into the plan we wanted. Let him get their on his own, let him have some semblance of control and he'd be more likely to stay. Control was something Seifer craved, and I knew the feeling. Or at least, had known it.

"No," I replied. "Not without alerting whoever they have on the inside."

Seifer's eyes turned to look at me. In the dim room, with the light inside the table shining up through it, his eyes glowed almost turquoise at me. "You're so certain there are two of them, then?"

I didn't know whether he was testing me or asking for confirmation but I was too tired or barbs or quips. "Whoever led the team that assaulted Irvine's ship was the muscle, but someone had to give them the information a GF had been requested, the flight-path, the time. Someone on the inside." _A traitor in Garden._ Just the thought made me a little twitchy.

"One or more." A grin slid up his face and was gone in half a second. The eyes went across to look at Kiros. "So we're flying alone on this one are we? No convenient mercs to back you up this time?"

Kiros' patience was almost visibly draining away as I watched him lock eyes with the man who had tried to disassemble his country. "If we had them I promise you wouldn't be out here, above ground. Maybe you should start thinking about what's going on and how to run them down instead of running your mouth, hmm?"

This was getting us nowhere, and I said so. All three men looked at me and I stood, paper rustling around me. "Seifer, unless you have something else to command on we should get started on something a little more concrete than just more talking. None of us want to be here-"

"Goddamn right," it could have been any of the three of them whispering it, but I ignored them all and powered on through it. I could see the city outside the glass windows of the Presidential Palace, and all I wanted was to be back out there, instead of stuck in here with two men who hated the third, and the third who didn't care.

"-but Kiros' plan is a good one and you know it. Just look at what we have and then help us figure out how to make a start."

Seifer tapped a stray sheaf on the desk side-on, making a _tap-tap_ noise the only sound in the room. He dropped it and leaned forward to look up at me. "You call this a good plan?"

I did the same until we were practically touching across the table. "I call it the best we have, when the only people we can rely on, the only people we can _trust_, are each other." God, what a horrible thought. I sat back down and watched Seifer stew over it in his head, those blue-green eyes looking at me and through me.

Suddenly he sat forward again. "Alright. I really don't think the good councillor has as much knowledge of infiltration as he thinks he does, but alright. What do I need?"

I slid across something, the thing that had kept me up all night. Every piece of information Esthar had been able to gather on Havensden came to a thin notebook. To me it looked embarrassingly thin – the ones Garden kept on the main city-states would have been as thick as encyclopaedias if they had ever been printed – but Kiros had said it was the best they could do.

Seifer evidently had the same opinion, because he looked down at the sheaf of pages in mock-disgust. Or maybe it was real disgust, I was too tired to tell the difference. "I know I said hole-in-the-ground Seagill, but it's not _literally_ one, right?" He flicked through idly.

"No, it isn't," I said. I'd read the whole thing when we had collated it. It was what you got when a village turned into a city and skipped the parts in between. A small city surrounded by a lot of agriculture, led by a mayor and a city council. No military except a small militia with whatever small arms they had carried when they'd joined the new town. They traded materials and some minerals with Esthar, they kept to themselves, they disliked outsiders that had an agenda. A typical newstate.

Seifer tossed it back down into the table, unread. "I'll make my own information when we get there."

"What?" Irvine and Kiros at the same time.

Seifer leaned back in the metal chair and put his hands behind his head. "This is useless to me Kiros, you should have known better. I'm not some diplomat going to talk about wheat prices, I'm Seifer Almasy, notorious war criminal-"

"And worse."

"-looking for a new shot at life, or at least at paid work. I'm going to be turning up tired and wet and if you can arrange it with that little fuzzball Tilmitt I'll arrive after being hunted by Trabia SeeDs too."

Selphie would be only too glad. Out of all of the gang I don't think any of us had been angrier than she had been at him. Squall and I had never really been surprised when the man had appeared against us in half-a-dozen battlefields. Irvine, the only one of us to keep his memories of our time together as children, had been conflicted more than anything else. Rinoa who had momentarily carried a torch for him had been hurt and angry. But to Selphie it had been a personal betrayal. Of Garden, of Balamb, of the forces of good, and later as one of the Orphanage Gang he had been a part of and had torn himself away from.

"If she can't, I can," Kiros said, and I remembered that no, Selphie wasn't the angriest by a long shot.

Seifer spread his hands; _see, see how right I am._ "So I turn up in their freezone, hunted and broken and looking for work and not too bothered who that work comes from. An irresistable prospect for the average rebel group. From there it's a short hop and skip to your little problem. Then I solve it."

Kiros looked ready to spit. "If you're so certain of this, you'll have no problems starting immediately. Seeing as how you have such a gleaming life to get back to once you're done here."

Seifer just stared at the other man for a second as Irvine and I traded a nervous glance, until; "Trust me, Kiros. They won't see me coming. And you won't see me leaving."

* * *

"So _you_ look like you're having the time of your life over here. Did married life finally pale?"

"I'm not married."

"SeeD would be heartbroken to hear you say that."

I tried to ignore him, but we were both too good at this. Seifer sat across from me in the now-empty room, staring at me attentively like he was a student back at a lecture, and the last eight years had never happened. Suddenly I felt just a little self-conscious in the Esthar clothes I was wearing, and I could feel the prickling of my hair across the back of my neck. "I'm here because of duty, Seifer," I said, far more of a snap in my voice than I had meant to put there, and he heard it.

"So it was the Garden and not you eh? What happened?"

All the time I'd been gathering up the papers the others had left in their wake I'd avoided looking at his eyes. Now I turned to face them and I was put back in surprise for a second when he did. He wasn't taunting me, he meant it. I didn't know which of the two would have made me angrier. I hadn't told my adopted brothers and sisters. I hadn't told my best friend. If he thought I would tell him he had another thing coming. I tried to deflect him. "Sometimes we have to go places we'd rather not. You should know that." And at least in the end, even if one day I grew to hate the sight of the place, I'd always have a place to return to. "What've you been doing since the war ended Seifer?"

"I've been surviving. Do you care?"

I bridled. The worst part was that I had once. Back when we had been barely more than children and they'd put me in authority over people my own age I'd offered help, as much of it as I could afford to give, and every time he'd taken it and thrown it back at me. Or worse, simply ignored it. I felt heat rising to my face and pushed it back down, hard. Suddenly I wanted to break through that infuriating air of nonchalance the man wore like a suit of armour. I'd read the report about his arrest. It had stunk to high heaven but my SeeD mindset had ignored it in favour of the much bigger problem that was now looming over me. But still, I had cared. "_Surviving?_ We pulled you out of a prison after a street-fight Seifer. How often do you have people coming after you like that?"

He took his time answering and seemed to relish just saying it. "Often enough," he said slowly, "that they should know better by now. I get by fine Trepe, and I don't need anyone's _permission_ to do so."

_My God, does he actually enjoy it._ It felt depressing. Years had passed somehow and the person sitting opposite me might as well have some directly out of a time-warp. I felt my hands shaking and gripped the papers tighter. "Then just get this finished and you can go back there." Back to whatever miserable days he had left. I turned and was about to walk out, not sure how long I could keep a grip on myself if I stayed around him any longer. I was almost out when…

"When _we_ finish, you mean."

I grabbed the doorframe before it could close and looked back. He was still looking at me, but now the steady gaze of disinterest had been replaced by something I recognised far too well. The last time I had seen it up close we had been facing each other across the black-marble surface of the Lunatic Pandora. Eyes that had a glint of evil amusement in them. "What?" I asked before my brain could catch up with my mouth and shut it down.

"You don't think Kiros is just going to set me loose in the north alone do you?"

I heard what he said but it took a second before I realised what he meant. I couldn't think of any reply. Like two swordsmen whirling around each other's guard he'd found a blind-spot I hadn't even thought was there. The smile widened, just a touch. "You can't possibly think I'm going to be your babysitter Seifer."

"SeeD's all about doing things you'd rather not do, right Instructor?"

Goddamnit he would enjoy it too. No matter how much he would hate someone else watching over him like a guard holding his chain he would enjoy it just to watch the other person suffer. "You're deluded." I cursed myself for the pathetic insult. Irvine had sat through his barbs and quips like a soldier and now here I stood spitting at him like a small child. Every time, every damn time. I didn't know what it was about the arrogant bastard but he could get under my skin like nobody else on earth. I'd spent years around vicious people, soldiers and politicians that treated words like instruments to draw out blood and information, and I'd built my shields well. But with Seifer it was personal. Like he was already standing inside those shields and I had no defences to push him back out.

"Something for you to think on Instructor." He walked past me and I felt his bulk against my shoulder as did. "Sleep well."

Then I was alone in the small room, red and orange light streaming in from the sunset outside. I sat back down, suddenly not wanting to go back out into the rest of the palace. I told myself it was because I still had work to do here but I knew there another reason, one I didn't want to think about. I looked down at the papers and felt angry. Angry I'd been put back in here and everyone knew I'd be too polite and just so, so _dedicated_ to try and walk out. Maybe it was my fault. I'd changed inside, the blood and tears from the beach that day had sunk in and twisted me up without altering the exterior, and from the outside I was still Quistis Trepe, Loyal SeeD. I felt more than mad, I felt furious, trapped. I threw the papers as hard as I could against the wall but all it did was make them spin around in the air like a thick snowdrift and it offered no release. At least there was nothing heavy in the room, I felt like breaking something. I felt like doing _damage _to something, and as far as I know Esthar didn't have a training ground.

I took my phone out of pocket and dialled the number before I could change my mind. She picked up on the first ring. Some things really never did change. "Hey, Xu."

"_God, do you know what time it is over here Quistis?"_

"I know you don't sleep." I felt better hearing her voice. Even if the thought of returning was increasingly toxic, Xu was still my friend. _Like the rainbow in an oil-slick._ But no, that as unfair. How're things at Balamb?"

"_Slow. Galbadia is behaving itself, at least while the ink is still drying on the treaty. I'm looking over contract reports for construction instead, Hyne spare me."_

"Isn't that Squall's job?" The word _contracts_ stirred something in my brain, but I couldn't quite…

"_He took off for Timber a day or so after you left. Speaking of leaving, how is it over there? Is it working out well?"_

And I couldn't tell her. I absolutely couldn't. No matter how much I wanted to have another person on my side of the fence Xu wasn't just my friend. She represented the entirety of the support corps and administration, with dozens of other SeeDs and innumerable Garden staff under her across three continents, and somewhere in that mass of manpower and intelligence was a festering sore that was bleeding out onto the rest. Xu's strength was her contacts and those were useless to me right now. "It's going okay."

"_I saw some reports Quistis, it sounds like you're doing good work over there. Maybe after you're done you can come back across the sea and work on the cities here too, God knows a couple of them need it."_

I could have laughed. "Thanks. Look after things over there for a little while longer okay?" I didn't know when I'd be back. If I'd be back.

"_With Squall gone? Might be an even easier job than before. Take it easy over there alright? We're going to want you home at some point."_

"Well, we'll see." I hesitated for a second, then… "Xu?"

"_Yes?"_

"Is Selphie in Trabia right now?"

"_Should be. Having some trouble?"_

I hated lying to her, but there was no way around it. "No, we just might need some backup on the reconstruction in Esthar, and T-Garden's closest." I stopped talking, afraid my voice might give something away. Sparring with Seifer had made me hyper-aware of every note and inflection in my words, and I wondered somehow if to Xu hundreds of miles away the lie showed in my voice like a horn-blast. "Goodnight Xu." I hung up without waiting for a response and leaned back in the chair, the off-white ceiling above criss-crossed with the shadows of the papers I had threw in useless anger. I could have stayed like that for a minute or an hour as the light slowly faded from the city outside. Esthar had other plans for me though.

"You should get some sleep too you know," Kiros said. I watched as he looked around the room. "He got to you did he?"

"A little," I admitted.

Kiros started gathering the pages up idly. "What was it like growing up with that guy?"

Like an endless boxing match. Like trying to break in a half-wild dog. Like trying to…there was no real comparison. "It was awkward."

"I'll bet." He sat across from me. "So do you think this will all work out?"

"It was _your_ idea," I replied, and wondered what he was fishing for. "If you don't want to use him I'm sure we could think of something else eventually."

"No, we need this solved. Five of our people dead and one of yours, not even counting the fact we have some invisible godlike _thing_ wandering out there in hostile hands. If he can get this under wraps for us he'll get his pardon _and_ that ticket out of here, and good riddance. At least this way everything worked out just fine."

Something in the way he said it was all it took, the same way I had been listening to my own words when talking with Xu. I felt a sinking feeling in my gut as I considered asking him _what worked out just fine_ but didn't know if I was ready for that answer or not. "It seems so," I said carefully. "When is he going to leave?"

"Tomorrow. As soon as possible. I want him as far from this city as I can get him. You know he has supporters, among the Sorceress cultists we have left? They think because he served Edea and Ultimecia he really _is_ a Knight, just like the poor deluded bastard thought he was. I want him gone before any of them can find out and do something about it." There was real venom in his voice as he spoke. Kiros along with Ward and Laguna had fought against Adel for years before finally trapping and imprisoning her. Along the way he'd seen every dungeon she had ever had built to hold dissidents and every unmarked grave she had thrown them into after. It hadn't been that long ago. Laguna had always cautioned for reconciliation when he came to the still-living remnants of Adel's rule, but Kiros would happily have thrown them into those same dungeons.

I turned my mind away from the horrible feeling that was sitting there asking for my attention at the same time that Kiros spoke, and as he did so I realised Seifer had been right, again.

"Speaking of leaving, there's something I wanted to talk to you about."

I tried to smile and half-managed it. "Of course. What can I do for you?" I had meant to say only the first two words but the rest came out all on its own. I just couldn't hold it in. Typical.

* * *

Even though I was looking out over the city's vista pretending to be interested in the sunrise, I could feel his eyes on my back, and the ever-so-slightly-smug grin that would be on his lips. Finally I couldn't stand it anymore and turned to face him. It was early, far too early to be playing childish games like this. We were both too old, at least I'd act that way. "Are we ready?"

They'd given us what they could, which wasn't much. A destitute mercenary and semi-criminal couldn't turn up in a freestate city in an Esthar transport in Esthar fashion. The offroader they had given us looked like surplus from the First Sorceress War; all hard edges and rusted steel and patchy upholstery. Everything was like that, even the clothes. Between the two of us we looked every inch the part. I'd left my whip behind, it being a dead-giveaway. Now the only weapons we had were a gun and thin blade on my belt and Seifer's gunblade. While everything else had either been carefully treated and aged or actually _was_ Galbadian in origin, Seifer's weapon still looked brand-new. Even though the man's clothing was tattered and frayed the sword still looked brand-new.

"It'll do," he said. He'd traded his faded white longcoat and blue shirt for something that could have come off a fishing-boat, all browns and hard-worn leather. I'd left behind my Esthar clothes for something similar, and whatever the material was I felt it scraping uncomfortably against my legs and chest whenever I moved anything. Kiros had suggested cutting my hair and Seifer had agreed, but I had drawn the line right there, and put it into a single long ponytail. It still had the blonde-white bleaching of a month spent outdoors in the desert, that would have to be enough.

Back at Balamb whenever I sent other people off on a mission I had always tried to think of something to say to help them, some words of encouragement or advice relevant to whatever they were going towards. Now with just the two of us on the outskirts of the city and nothing ahead of us but the hot desert I could think of nothing. "Let's just go." How inspiring.

He took the driving seat, and I didn't care enough to argue as with a roar of ill-maintenance and the stink of old gasoline the old machine set off north. I resisted the urge to look back at the city as we left, instead settled for just staring out of the side. It didn't even have windows, just a steel framework that the Galbadians that originally used it would have shot their rifles from.

"So Kiros really thinks you're going to be my minder?"

The scenery flew past us, the flat sands to either side giving the impression we were floating above it all. "Maybe he thinks you can't do it alone," I replied without looking around.

The keep ground over us and protested in wailing engine noises as Seifer changed gears far too hard. "You really think you could stop me if I tried to get away?" he asked.

I did look over him then, but his eyes were glued to the horizon, as if we were in a crowded city and not a desert. The air around me that had felt cool and soothing in my Esthar clothes felt sticky and constricting in these old rags, and the heat from the engine behind felt like a furnace compared to the sun above. The mountain way-stations leading to Trabia - and relief from the heat – were still at least a day's ride off, and I had no desire to spend it trading thinly-veiled insults with the man. Seifer had been the best of SeeD once, but combat skills were something you worked to keep, and worked hard. Even when Squall had become Commander he had never forgot that, and neither had I. I wondered if years slumming around the world had blunted that blade just a little more than Seifer realised. "I think you'd be surprised." Whether he believed me or not I didn't see and didn't care.

We went north, and the last thing I saw of Esthar was from the mountain roads leading past the border into Trabia, a glint of light like a precious jewel, floating on an ocean of pure white sand.


	7. A Sharp Cold Smile

"You look surprised."

"I wasn't expecting something this big, I'll admit."

"Not reading your own briefing material? You're slipping Instructor. Bet you didn't expect this part either."

She hasn't bound up her hair again, hoped that keeping it free out of her usual styled mess will make it less obvious who it is under the cut, and snow's already gathering in it like white tassles on a platinum-coloured curtain. Sometimes I catch myself turning around to say or ask something, and I look at her and think _who the hell is this, and where did Trepe go?_ The eyes are the same though, she can't change those. Hopefully it won't matter. I've known- I knew her for years and the imagine I still have of _SeeD __Quistis__ Trepe _is a woman with styled blonde hair and a peach jacket and skirt. Not an almost-white ghost in dirty brown leather clothes.

When she paces the long hair whirls around her, like a cream-silk curtain wavering in the air. "No Almasy, _this_ I saw coming a mile away."

If I wanted a rise out of her I didn't get it, hadn't been a very good one either if I was be honest. The buggy that Seagill had left us was perfect for the job, which meant it was an old broken-down piece of crap with torn panelling, a coughing engine and metal seats_. _We'd frozen our asses up and down a mountain, wind howling in from outside like it had a grudge. At first I felt pretty cheerful knowing Trepe was every bit as angry she was coming here as I was, but after the first hundred miles even that small joy went away and all we could do was trundle down Trabia's godforsaken landscape. I think when we crossed the last hill and finally hit something that could almost be called a road we'd both just sighed and got on with it. Lights and sound coming down from the plains below had appeared as we had passed the final curves out of the mountains, and I'd gunned the engine one last time as we went the last few dozen miles down to the city below. It wasn't the perfect paved roads of Galbadia or even the smooth dirt paths of Balamb, but it was the closest thing we'd since to civilisation since we had passed Trabia's northern borders, and that was good enough. We'd got within hailing distance of the gates with blessed relief.

Then we'd stopped, and hadn't started again.

The guns made sure of that.

* * *

I watch as Trepe paces outside the buggy, back and forth, back and forth, just trying to stay warm in the half-blizzard we're wrapped up in. You'd think her feet would have tired out after the first hour but nope, still going. The two guards on either side of the gate are watching her, the same stupid expressionless lockjaw-gaze guards all over the world seem to practise. But they have the heavy coats so they're the ones laughing I guess. They have the guns as well. I still have my gunblade, but it's in the back of the buggy, and Trepe isn't armed at all.

"Think that'll do any good?" I ask, but instead of answering she just shoots a murderous glance at me and goes back to pacing in the snow, the warm groove her boots have made in the concrete path melting the snow around her. It's chipped, badly-maintained, like hardly anyone uses it. I saw the western entrance as we came down, and that one looked flawless. Guess nobody really comes by this way enough to make something better.

Finally she leans back up against the buggy, still not speaking, still angry. I'm not sure why, she read the briefing just as well as I did. Probably a couple of times at that. Reality always turns out stranger than you think.

* * *

"_Is _that_ it?"_

"_Looks about right," I say in return, and hand over the binoculars. "Unless you think there's some other place around here that could qualify."_

_Usually I'd expect a comeback but at this point we're past that. She stares through the glasses for a second and puts them down again. _

"_I wasn't expecting anything so…big," she says. "When Kiros said a town I expected…well. A town. That thing's practically a city."_

"_Pretty piss-poor excuse for a city but I get your point."_

_It hugs the plains below us like it's trying to stay out of the wind. I wonder how many people it has in it, how many finally got sick enough of the stupid bitching and moaning and small-wars of the rest of the world to up-sticks and run all the way out here, out to the land that Trabia and Esthar don't care about enough to even lay claim to._

_Havensden, the free-state._

_It looks like Galbadia if someone smashed it down into the ground. No buildings above three stories, no skyscrapers or huge parade-sized squares and roads. Everything built close together, brick and cement and what looks like some kind of wood, swear to god, all crushed into the plain. Even the fields are huddled close by, on the few patches of greenery that aren't buried under snow this late in winter. It's big enough, bigger than Balamb easily, maybe the same size as Dollet. If this the place people come to get away from it all, there's a hell of a lot of those people. This isn't the only free-state city, but it's the biggest. You can see where it started, in the middle. A small, circular gathering of buildings around a tiny square where the village had originally lain, surrounded by the rest. Roads had been added where they'd been needed to cart goods or food around like the spokes in a wheel, and around those spokes things had just built up as people had arrived. Some buildings looked like Balamb-style bungalows; others were the squat square workings of Galbadian engineers. The whole thing was a hodge-podge, a mess. It could fit a couple of hundred thousand, easily. Maybe Galbadia and all the other rotten old places have a bigger problem than they knew, if this many people were willing to risk it in the north. I can see the citizens even at this distance, moving around the town in small black specks, out in the fields running to and fro. _

_I glance sideways and Trepe's looking down on it, with an expression I mainly recognise because I've worn it myself so many times. Looking like she'd like to stamp on something until it goes away. I'm a little surprised. "Gil for your thoughts?" I ask before I can stop myself._

"_Guards," is all she says, and hands back the binoculars._

_She's right. Four of them, at the entrance, way too still and way too well-armed to be just four men bunking off from work. "Immigration control maybe?"_

"_No," she replies. All business now, so far the only way we can get through a conversation and stay civil, although the last few days on the way here it was damn close. "Havensden let anyone in except…anyone, really." Anyone except SeeDs, and I hold my grin down. I read the same brief she did; outside military isn't welcome in Havensden, especially mercenaries. That must really piss her off. She goes on; "Getting in won't be a problem, it's what you do after."_

"_What _we_ do."_

_I catch it, that little twist of her lips. "Fine, what _we_ do."_

_The guards stop us at the gate, and everything slows to a crawl._

* * *

She stands over the buggy looking away from the city, hands behind her back like the schoolteacher she used to be. "Do you think they're worried."

I've asked myself the same question, and I think I know the answer. "They recognised me. Now they're trying to figure out how to respond. That or they _really_ don't like people from Esthar. Or they're uptight about people with loose morals running around their city."

She grimaces, a little bit. That's her cover if they ask. Just a woman I picked up on the way across the world, along for the ride, and all the other things that implies. Trepe's always had pride, and I know it must piss her off to play it like this. That's mainly why I convinced Seagill this was the best way for us to appear when we got here, and it seemed funny back in Esthar. Maybe it was going a little too far.

The guards shuffle on their feet and I glance past them, through the rough stone arch. There are shadows there in the snowstorm, and they're getting bigger. The guards come from a huddled slouch to attention, and I know this is finally it. "Ah, finally."

She spins around to look, making a minature snowstorm of her own as she does so. I'm up and walking towards the guards and I can see it takes her a second to remember that this time _she_ very much has to follow _my_ lead. Trepe puts her head down, hands clasped in front of her like a meek little kitten, and she walks slightly behind me as she does so. That's her other problem, why she's so angry. She may be in charge of this little excursion but now, in the belyl of the beast, the starring role is mine again. She's just the attentive servant-stroke-mistress. Hilarious. Together we watch as a trio come past the guards towards us.

"Mr Almasy. I heard it but I hardly believed it."

There are three of them but it's perfectly clear who the one in charge is. The women is hidden beneath two of three layers of fur, hard to see anything under it, but she's bowed over, looks tired just being out here. The man on the other side is big, taller than me. He's wearing less, has his arms crossed like he's one of the guards trying to stare me down with hard brown eyes under some kind of military-style buzz-cut. He even has a pistol at his side. Chalk them up as _clerk_ and _security_ maybe, I can find out more later once I get inside. The brains and the muscle. That only leaves…

That same brushed-back oily hair, the same easy smile, somehow managing to look calm and at ease like all five of us (I don't count the guards, they're just furniture here) are in some warm office-room instead of outside in a blizzard. It takes me a second but I realise who the man in the middle reminds me of. Fury Caraway, the clock rolled back to around his late-twenties, plucked away from the comfortable mansion he has in Galbadia and dropped into this half-built frontier city. He walks up to me with a smile on his face like I was some long-lost family member finally come home again. I didn't need to look around at Trepe to know what she's thinking, because I've always known what she thinks about fakers.

We both dislike him instantly.

"I'm pretty unbelievable," I say. I know he won't faze, these kinds of people don't.

"Mind if I ask what you're doing here?" he says, still with a faint smile, a default expression apparently so he doesn't accidentally get caught being anything other than charming and helpful.

"Looking for a warm roof, mainly." I don't ask him his name yet. Force him to ask the questions, so I can see how he's approaching this. If he drives us off so be it, we'll find another way in. I don't think he will though, and neither does Trepe.

"Well we have them for sure," the man says. "If you and your friend…" he trails off with a hand outstretched towards Trepe. I don't give him an answer though, and after a tick he just goes on smooth like he'd never stopped. "We're just curious though."

Fine. That's enough. "About what?"

"About who you might be draggin' in behind you," Large 'N' Tall asks from behind the man. I glance at him for the first time and he meets it easily, looking down on me like that's enough to make me scared of him, god tall people annoy me sometimes.

"Like?" I probably know the answer, but let's see who he's afraid of.

"Like the kind of people that might be chasin' you, Almasy." the goon responds.

The first man flows between us as smooth as oil. "What we mean is, the people you're trying to get away from are the people _we_ came here to get away from," he says. "We're not eager to be wrapped up in the problems you might bring."

Maybe there's something there, maybe there isn't. If he'd worried I'd bring SeeD down on them then they'd have been dirty. Doesn't seem that way though, if all they're worried about is Trabia or Esthar. That's enough for now though. "Nobody's chasing me that hard anymore," I reply, and hope that Kiros was honest when he said he'd call off the hounds from me, and let people know it. Of course the bastard made damn sure I knew he'd put them right back on me if I stepped out of line. "I heard up here people don't care for the rest of the world. That you're making something new. I'm not gonna lie and say I'm eager to be a part of it-" absolutely true "-but right now you people seem to have a city to build up, and you don't want to be disturbed just as much as me."

The big man behind me isn't convinced, but the charmer seems to eat it up. He smiles again, that politico smile. "Then I think we'll get along fine, as long as you treat us the same way you'd like to be treated." He reaches out his hand again, and when he comes close I can finally see his eyes. "I'm Lyle Diran. You've probably guessed it by now but I'm part of the little council we have in the city." He gestures to the two people behind him, the brute. "Mr Kurlen here is something of our chief security expert." Finally, at the well-wrapped woman who still hasn't said a word, just stood there clutching her bag. "Lily doesn't talk much, but she keeps our town working. The rest of the council, well, I'm sure you'll meet us eventually. We don't really hold with mayors or royalty, we like something more…inclusive. Every voice to be heard, that sort of thing."

"Charmed. Seifer Almasy."

"And your friend?"

I can see the big one – Kurlen – smirking. If he thinks Trepe is just a portable floozy I've brought up here with me then that's fine. All the more satisfying when we end up shoving that smirk up his ass. "This is Imalia. She's a friend." Out of the corner of my eye I can see Trepe bowing instead of nodding. If they ask I have a cover ready to go, but I don't think we'll need it. Diran just smiles some more and nods enough for all of us.

"Welcome to Havensden, Mr Almasy." He reels off a small speech, which I get the impression the usual rabble get from some underling. It's full of words I barely listen to; I already have what I wanted from these three, for now. I do get one other thing though, and its welcome, I won't lie. "There's a small place we have for new arrivals. It's not much but it's warm and out of the snow. Just until you find a place for yourself in your little…community."

"Lead on," I say, as the trio turn around, and just like that we're past the gates. I nod once to the guards still on duty and visibly shivering, just for the sake of it, and to my surprise one of them nods back. Maybe out here people really _don't_ give a damn about the rest of the world.

The arches vanish in the blizzard behind us, and we're inside.

* * *

"Well?" I ask.

Lyle hadn't been kidding when he said it wasn't much. A house that looked like a brick of concrete from outside, and like a prison cell from inside. Two beds, a small bathroom with a shower and not much else. In fact 'not much else' pretty much describes the thing. There are cracks in the slate-gray walls and the seats and beds look like they've been cobbled together from whatever spare timber and cloth they had lying around when they finished the rest of the town. It's warm though, so the rest I ignore. I've lived in worse places for longer.

"About the town or the people?" Trepe asks back, still looking outside the window.

"Let's start with our little welcoming committee," I reply. At that she turns around and sits on one of the seats, looking just over my shoulder and I know she's using that SeeD training to recall every inch of what just happened. There's light coming in from outside and it's bouncing off her hair, casting an odd shadow across her face. The old Trepe I still remember, blonde and blue and that schoolteacher impatience that always seemed a half-second away from trying to fix what you were doing wrong. Now it's like sitting across from a wraith, a Zen-goddamn-master. It's eerie. It's been five years since the Second War, but that doesn't seem like such a long time for such a big change.

What the hell _happened?_

"The middle-man seemed off," she says. "He doesn't match the town."

"I'd be shocked if 'Lyle Diran' was his real name," I say. Too smooth, in a place where smoothness wouldn't have much value. People like Kurlen I expected. Big, tough and outspoken goons who didn't take crap from anyone, coming out here because they thought they could be free in a way they weren't in the old world. Building a city up here – and it was one, regardless of what Seagill and his goons might hope – took cold, hard effort. There'd have been no room or patience for a schmoozer to get as high up as leadership, not unless he had something else to bring to the table. I say this.

"Agreed," she says. "But that isn't our main concern right now."

"Can you feel anything?"

Her eyes snap towards me and I can tell she's annoyed. "What do you mean _feel_?"

Suddenly I'm on the defensive, and I have no idea why. I shrug and wave my hand vaguely at her, like I'm Leonhart or something. "Can't you…can't you see if the GF is here or not? Look for it with that Blue stuff you have?" This would go a whole lot faster if…

Said blue flashes at me from behind her eyes. Not in anger though. Now I'm just confused. The days we took getting here and this is the most emotion I've seen out of her. "It doesn't work like that, Seifer. It wasn- it isn't a compass." God, my first name too. She's really worked up about this. There's a puzzle there. The question is; do I give a shit about finding the answer?

Not right now. "Fine, so you've got nothing. Then we do this the hard way."

She sighs, and I know she's on the same wavelength as me. She hesitates for a second, and then… "I'm worried about the man he was with. Kurlen."

"I'm not," I shoot back. He was big, I'll give him that. Big and mean and probably rodent-cunning, if he's the one who winded up being the head of whatever policing militia they have here. He played second-fiddle to Lyle though, back at the gates, and that means he's just the muscle, no matter his title. Diran's glad-handing smile and Kurlen's fat fists. Probably the first directing the second, and the second too dumb to realise just because you have the guns doesn't make you the one in charge. If things go to shit it's those fists I'll meet first-

"Hey," she says, and I'm jerked out of the reverie I didn't realise I was in. "We shouldn't get ahead of ourselves."

She's right. I take a deep breath and calm down. We got here an hour ago and I'm already thinking of my exit. Need to stop that, no sense in running while Trepe and Seagill have me on a ball and chain. Enough to worry about right now without that too.

"He obviously didn't like you," Trepe says.

"I'm still not worried, plenty of people don't like me. But did you hear him? He was more worried about what who might be following me here." Like I said, not as smart as Diran. "He's either _really_ a rugged individual, or he's worried about bring Trabian/Estharian attention to the city."

She nods, she knows it too. She taps her fingers on the rough wood of the chair. "So, our first step."

"We need the loose thread." There has to be one, every conspiracy will. SeeD tells you to find the weak link, the tear in the canvas, the loose thread in the shirt. From there it doesn't matter how well-made it is, all you need to do is follow it back to the start, and the boss. "We _know_ the group operates near here?"

"Near, or inside," Trepe says. "Those ships didn't just disappear into the ether. Either they were taken for parts or they're being stored somewhere for repair. Maybe the second and third ships are being scrapped to fix the first, or they're being sold overseas for money and goods. That amount of work can't go unnoticed by everyone. And that isn't all they have to hide."

"The GF."

She nods. "If they try and use it, it won't be pretty, or subtle. If they're unprepared, Ifrit will tear them apart."

"You're kidding." _That_ one? Thanks Kinneas, thanks a goddamn lot. Why couldn't you have lost an easy one? "Well, maybe they'll do it. The big guy can kill them and save us the trouble."

"Let's not count on that. They have a SeeD and an ex-SeeD, they won't make that mistake. They'll keep it somewhere safe, probably at whatever base they have."

There would be signs, somewhere. Outsiders bunking in the town and going in and out every day to work. Maybe there were parts being used somewhere in the city to power the heat and lights. Maybe someone had more money than they should have and no explanation as to how, or some areas of the place were avoided when talk about expansion came around. I walked over to the window, and I could feel Trepe's eyes following me as I look out over the place. An ugly patchwork, parts taken from all over the world and stuck down here in the final plains before the snow closed over the ground. Somewhere out in that maze and chaos there was a thread sticking out of the ground, just waiting for us to find it. I looked back at her, found blue eyes boring into mine. Maybe the rest of her was different, but those eyes were the same. Sapphires. Is it my imagination, or are they just a little darker than they were?

"It won't be easy," I say.

"It never is." She sighed, and there it was again. A hint of something else, underneath the annoyance and the tiredness. Maybe it'll be a challenge to find out exactly where it came from. "We'll start with Kurlen then. The militia, the police, whatever he runs. They must have an administration of some sort, I'll start there." There's a tiny smirk there, anyone normal would have missed it, but I know her too well. "They have no reason to suspect me. You'll have to do a little catching up though."

I can see it in my head now. A snapshot of the ugly bastard at the top of an imaginary board, just waiting for the space below to be filled with lines and pictures and connecting facts, until at some point a slip-up or a talkative worker or simple bad luck will give us the way in. From there it gets easier, but more murky. Maybe we can roll straight up the ladder to Kurlen or whoever is in charge, and the black outlines where a SeeD-trained terrorist and a traitorous SeeD are, take them down or take them out and go home heroes. Maybe it will all go wrong and we'll have to charge in swinging and shooting. "Oh, I think I can weasel my way in somehow Instructor."

"What's so funny?"

I catch Trepe looking at me and I realise she's right. I'm smiling. "Nothing," I say, and she just goes back to staring at the inside of her own head, doing the exact same thing I was but probably with a little more precision, and a much nicer-looking board. I'm still smiling though, and I know why. Fun. For the first time in months – hell, in years – things look like they're going to be fun. I consider thanking Trepe, but she wouldn't know why or what for, and I'm too tired for needling at her head to be fun tonight. The suns' already falling, and it looks like we have some long days ahead of us.

Trapped inside a city that hates the outside world, with a woman that they'd hate even more if they knew who she really was, and who dislikes me just as much. Somewhere in the distance a terrorist group with enough skill to take down Esthar aircraft, tame black SeeDs, and a brand-new GF that could ruin the city like a bomb if prodded in the wrong way. Surrounded by ice on all sides in a labrinthyne nightmare I don't know and can't trust to hide me. No way out of this predicament, nothing short of success or death.

Still though, I'm not entirely unhappy.

* * *

Welcome back, after a few weeks' break. My main story right now is stll _Until the Fall of Night,_ but from now on expect irregular updates of this, instead of total blank silence.

Thanks for reading! Reviews and stuff appreciated of course.

~Cobray


	8. Hot Eyes

_Even as I push as hard as I can to keep it inside, it forces itself up and out and past me and there's nothing I can do about it. I can feel the blood flowing through and over and past my hands, taking his heartbeat away with it._

"_Can't you do something?"_

_I want to but what I used to have isn't there anymore, the last month has stripped it away as it went by and left a hollow empty place where that help had been. A cascade of bullets and blades and near misses and too many that didn't miss at all. I'm weak from bad or no food, I can barely see out of eyelids heavy with no sleep, barely able to speak out of cracked lips from no water._

"_I'm sorry, he's gone."_

_The spark's out, now all my hands are doing is pressing down on empty meat. Slathered in red, I wonder if it will ever wash off. If I look up I know what I'll see; pleading eyes that will ask me to do something I can't, that think I can somehow reach out for that spark and bring it back down. The remnants go into a black plastic bag and become identical to the other dozen along the beach, and still I can hear gunfire far away in the distance. By the end of today more of the children coming up the sand towards the line of buildings will be swallowed by these formless plastic shrouds, to become interchangeable and nameless._

_And for what?_

* * *

"Understanding everything alright?"

I smiled at the woman and tried to look intimidated as I lifted the stack of papers. "I'll be fine, thank you." She nodded and wandered out. I could still hear the wind howling outside the walls, but at least the cold didn't penetrate through them.

_Lucky,_ Seifer had said when the small piece of paper had been thrown under the door of the concrete box we'd been sharing. They'd called it temporary until we could find something better but both of us knew it was nothing more than a holding room while they checked us out. Havensden looked as low-tech as it sounded, but Seifer had he'd put money on them having some kind of channel to the outside world, and I wouldn't bet against that question. Even if they'd wanted total independence from the outside world something told me Lyle Diran would find a way to keep some links open, and Seifer wouldn't bet against _that._

Two days of cold days and bad sleep and then they'd come for us both. Comparing notes afterwards it had been the same; a stocky-looking man in a steel room with a lot of questions and no humour at all. I'd played the role of timid underling to the hilt and it had worked. The piece of paper that had been slipped to me had two things on it; my assumed name and an address, near the centre of the town. Seifer didn't have the bonus of anonymity; his own paper had his real name, and the address of the one of the guardposts. While I was inside filing and recording, he was outside in the cold, patrolling the edges of the town for intruders.

_Well that's pretty ironic to start with since we're inside the edges already,_ he had said, but I could see he was annoyed underneath it all. I'd asked what he had expected and he had just shrugged. _Something with a fire to start with, goddamn its cold up here._ I'd thought years spent half on the run might have taught him patience, but I'd been a fool to think so, apparently.

"Imalia?"

I looked up from the papers to see a pair of green eyes staring down at me, over a smile and a thick coat. She had already been waiting for me when I got to my first day of 'work' for the town. Kira Seril had been the third member of the suspicious trio back at the town's edges, the pen and paper to Kurlen's guards and Diran's smile. Even in a town this small and…independent…it still generated paperwork that needed to be dealt with. Contracts and deals between villagers, receipts and bonds and deeds and any of the other things that came up from just people living and working for each other. When the interview with the stern man – one of Kurlen's goons – had ended, she had looked at the transcipts and grabbed me. She said it was because my experience – a bunch of false references and guide supplied by Kiros – made me a good fit, but really I wondered if she just wanted someone to talk to. Men outnumbered women in Havensden, it wasn't hard to notice.

"Want to take a break?" she said, rising out of her coat. At first it had seemed silly, but a day outside of our holding cell and in the town itself had made me ask where they made them. North of Trabia winter hit hard.

I was spinning my wheels, on idle. They had put me in the smallest office they had, sorting land and material scripts. I'd done the same work sometimes back at Garden, but it had never been anything more than crushingly dull. Seifer would have gone insane. "Okay."

"You don't have to be so stiff you know." She took a thin flask out of the depths of her padded jacket and handed it out. "I may have seniority but out here that's all. Havensden cares more about ability than years marked down."

"I know." I'd heard it a few times. Even though Kira had been nothing but friendly to me in the couple of days since I arrived I wasn't sure if I believed it quite yet. Maybe if I had been a refugee or a family, fleeing from the other cities in the world, Councilman Diren's ("Please, call me Lyle.") words might have been enough to make me feel happy. But I'd spent months with SeeD in smoky meeting rooms listening to politicians and leaders and elders making the same words and expressions and gestures, and something about the man's easy smoothness had rung hollow for me. Seifer had come to a similar conclusion, in a simpler way.

_Because any real politician or swindler is going to look at this place – no SeeD, no Esthar, nobody else to make him stick by the rules – and see a goldmine. Or a crown._

"You look nervous, Imalia. Is there anything I can do to help.

Nothing you would say yes to. "I've not been sleeping well," I settled for.

She frowned from underneath the furred hood of her long jacket. "Is it the cold? I know people from Esthar have trouble adjusting to-"

"Just bad dreams," I said, and cursed my mouth for running ahead without waiting for my brain. "Nothing serious."

"Are they something to do with why you came up here?" she asked.

Such a simple question but somehow it managed to slip past my defences. I missed a step at her words and almost stumbled in the snow. She was closer than she knew. "Something like that," I said. "It's…complicated."

"It would have to be if you came up here with _Seifer Almasy,"_ she said, almost under her breath. Even though we'd been here less than a week I'd seen the same reaction every time. Like the name of the man was some kind of talisman to the people up here that they had to invoke with reverence or not at all. I wondered how they would feel towards him if they knew him as well as I did. Knew the prideful and spiteful reality of the man behind the image they'd built of him as some kind of revolutionary anti-authority – because that was what it came down to apparently, so many years after the Second War had ended – figure. But I found I didn't mind it so much as I thought I would; being seen as just an addition that came with him. I'd spent years being at the front under the spotlight. Let it be _his_ turn for a change, and I could hide in that shadow just fine. "How did you both end up coming here?" she trailed off at the end, the curiosity in her voice leading back into the half-halting half-apologetic speech she usually had on. If I was pretending to be a wilting violet I was in good company.

We'd been through this, in case we were asked. As much of the truth as we could spare, with only a few of the details changed. "We met in Esthar, after he'd been let out of prison and told to leave before they locked him up again." Technically true. I could see her nodding in the corner of my eye as we walked and talked. The way she did it so emphatically. "He had to go and I…I didn't see a reason to stay." And there was the lie. But it was one I'd have to stick with. Sometimes when I dreamed I could see the white sands in the distance, the cool air and the blue sky that were somewhere far, far to the south. Another reason to get out of this ludicrous, awful mission and back into the real world.

"I was the same way," Kira said, and I could see by the faraway look in her eyes that she wasn't lying. Seifer and I both had our doubts about this town – no, call it a city, it was big enough to qualify even if it hugged the ground instead of towering into the air – but the more I watched and listened the more I saw men and women like the green-eyed and hunched-down woman across from me; private and scared people who had _some_ reason strong enough to make them leave everything behind and come to places like this. Seifer called them fools but I wasn't so sure anymore. "I came up here back when…back when it was smaller, before everything started growing so _fast._ Everyone here was good to me, compared to back in Dollet." She turned to look at me. "If you give it a chance I know you'll like it just as much."

I looked around at the snow that covered everything in a white shroud, and the buildings that barely rose above the ground. Thinking back to the green and blue tranquillity of Balamb, or the endless infinity of Esthar's plains and spires, or even the noise and bustle of Galbadia or Dollet that were at least _alive, _I doubted it. I just smiled, and said thank you.

Kira shivered, even in the depths of that thick coat. "We should get back to work," she said, and looked at me. "I know things may seem harsh now, but just give them time alright? Don't give up."

"I…I didn't plan on it," I replied, with a little less certainly than I thought as she looked at me. Instead of smiling again or replying, she went on:

"You look like you're missing something, Imalia. Like something from your old life is trying to drag you back there and you don't know whether you want to fight or not."

"I don't know what you mean," I threw out as casually as I could, but she'd shaken me. Suddenly the snow falling on my shoulders felt just a little colder.

She wasn't buying what I had to sell, and I felt just a little nervous. My god, was I so transparent? "Maybe when we know each other better, when you're _really_ part of our town you can tell me. But just give it some time alright? Give us a chance to help before you run back to whatever you left."

"Alright, I promise," I said, and cringed a little inside. I'd done undercover missions before, but they didn't come easily to me. Lying to someone who wished me their best left a bad taste in my mouth no amount of the teeth-achingly cold water they had up here would wash away. I'd asked Xu for help once, but on that front she hadn't had any advice I could use. _It comes naturally or it doesn't,_ she had said. _Just swallow and bear it until the mission ends._

"Look, we're here."

Kira pointed out to the distance in front of us, and I realised she hadn't just been idling leading us around the streets. In front of me the road suddenly ended, and the buildings suddenly stopped as if an invisible wall had suddenly cut off all construction. The road we had been walking down split, curving away to the left and right. A meter or so past the road the snow changed texture, and I knew that we were at the centre of the city as the concrete roads changed to grass and cobblestones. The buildings in front of us were huddled up, more rounded than the ones behind us. These were the original foundation of the town that Seifer and I had seen from so far away just a few days ago.

"This is where I work, the Council." She said the word with something approaching a religious fervour.

_So it was here._ I shivered and pantomimed pulling my coat up as I stared at the small cluster of buildings the government of Havensden occupied. "What's it like?" I asked, and tried to put in the same reverent expression that she had.

She thought for a second, her breath crystallising in the cold air as she spoke. "It's…It feels good. Like I'm doing something for them that matters."

"Not just deeds and contracts in there, then?" I asked as lightly as I dared, and hoped for a reply I could use.

I didn't get one, but she didn't shut me down entirely. She shook her head. "No, not just them. We do those but mainly it's trade and things like that I mean I can't talk about it, but…"

Interesting. But I'd gone far enough for today, so I just smiled and nodded and changed the subject to something innocent and unrelated. I used to push too hard, tried to force my way past people's objections and problems to try and get what I wanted. Xu had tried to teach me better after the Second War – the memory of one disastrous confrontation with Rinoa still in my mind – and I liked to think I'd learned something from her. Esthar had done the same, gave me a sense of calm I'd fought hard to try and keep even as Kiros and my own stubborn sense of duty had dragged me out. I had patience now, one I hadn't before.

I was making full use of it.

* * *

"God it's cold out there."

I watched as Seifer stalked over to the fireplace, tugging at his gloves as he went. His greatcoat was dripping with melted snow before he'd even got both of them off and tossed them aside. I could see the sweat coming from his hands as he held them up to the blazing fire. "Nice place they've given us at least."

Anything would have been better than the box they'd put us both in, but they'd gone out of their way. It was hidden in the maze of other houses somewhere in what Kira had said was the 'craftsman's quarter' of the city. Pushed in amongst a line of other brick-and-mortar buildings, the inside had four rooms and if we wanted to be in the same room at the same time we had to be careful about personal space. The furniture was second-hand and the decorations were clearly old and brought up north from Dollet or Balamb, but it had a fireplace that worked and windows that kept out the cold, and for both of us it was enough. The first day at such close quarters had been a stretch, and more than once I'd felt my temper fraying a little farther than I would have liked. After that we'd both taken a step back and a deep breath. We both knew our own boundaries well enough, and we were both professionals-

_Or were professionals._

-and we knew this might not be over anytime soon. Better to not be snapping at each other when we had to be working so close together. "Speaking of which…" I began.

"Yeah," Seifer said as he caught onto the end of my thoughts. "Makes me wonder exactly why we've been given something this soon. I asked the other guards and some of them said they had to wait for weeks for theirs." He sneezed. "Or build their own."

"You're talking with them already?" I asked, as delicately as I could.

"You didn't hear? I'm practically a goddamn celebrity up here." He went on and I listened to what I'd already figured out mostly. Half-remembered facts mixed in with myths and hearsay. They didn't remember that Seifer had been a Knight for a crazed and possessed woman, or that he'd fought against and almost destroyed his home. They remembered that he'd been fighting against Esthar and against SeeD. Up here in the north it seemed that history had been twisted around and blinded by the snow just like everything else, and that was enough.

"Are they telling you anything?" I asked.

"As much as you're hearing in your library I assume. So jack shit, for now." Seifer collapsed back into one of the old upholstered chairs that lay in the room we'd unconsciously decided had to be a livingroom. Still in his shirt and meltwater-covered pants and shoes, he looked out of place in the tattered red leather of the seat, firelight reflecting from his eyes. "They don't trust me yet, but they will."

"You think so?" I asked.

He looked across at me, eyes glinting in the firelight. Held my gaze. For a second neither of us spoke, eyes locked on each other as the wood crackled and burned in the small hearth. "I think so, yeah," he said quietly, and I knew he could. Even during the months of the war when we'd spent years hating him, Seifer had still had it; that magnetism that made people follow him. The disciplinary committee in Balamb that had elected him over other candidates, Fujin and Raijin, and then G-Garden and the entire Galbadian military he'd practically commanded singlehandedly at the end of the fighting. Some force of personality that made people look up to him and follow him. He gave a smile and I felt a shiver run through me. It felt like those eyes were burning through me. Once I might have tried to burn back, but I was too tired. Or at least that was what I told myself. If I'd had eyes like that once then right now they were gone, along with whatever else I'd had once and thrown away, back in the sands of that fucking cursed beach.

Then he looked away, and the feeling passed. The warmth of the fire flowed back through my body and silence descended back down on us. I coughed and tried to clear the smoky heat that felt like it had got into my lungs from the open flame. _Well, let's hope they trust you soon._ "Well, let's hope that comes pretty soon," I muttered, too loudly.

"Oh, you're not enjoying your newfound freedom up here in the pristine north?" Seifer said, and I could hear the challenge in his voice. Not as mocking as it had been a day ago, he was too tired for a real verbal sparring match, but it was there all the same.

"It doesn't appeal me to me much," I said.

"Why not?" he asked, and behind the words I could see a genuine question. I looked away from the roaring fire, and that glint in his eyes was still there, but tempered this time. He was serious.

A day spent making small talk with Kira and spent filing forms I knew were pointless had infuriating me more than I thought. If the closest thing I'd get to a familiar conversation was with Seifer Almasy, then I'd take it. "People here are still under someone's thumb. They left one city and they've arrived at another one is all. It's just a dream," I said.

"What's wrong with dreams?" he shot back, and I remembered; one of his few sore spots, one that had dragged him through hell and almost brought us along with it. I thought long and hard before I answered, and finally came up with something I could put into words without rocking the boat we both sat precariously on.

"This dream isn't real," I said. "These people – most of them – wanted to come up here to escape from something back in, well, back in the old world." Old. I didn't like the word. Mainly by the way my entire life was back in that old world. "These places; Havensden and others like it. They're just copies of what's already there."

"What about the ones who were chased out? Or ran out?" he asked.

_You'd be familiar with that._ I didn't say it. "They could have stayed, changed things from the inside of running aw-"

I tried to stop myself but it was too late. I tried to rally and find some other way to end that sentence, but there was nothing there, and as I froze up the silence descended back on the two of us like a suffocating curtain dropped over the room from above I waited for Seifer to strike and ask what I'd so neatly set up for him;

_So why were you in Esthar and not Balamb, Instructor? Why did you change so much I barely recognised you back in that interrogation room? Why did Kiros have to practically beg to get you to come on this mission, when we both know SeeD is the only life you have? _Seifer opened his mouth to speak and I braced myself for it.

"Maybe at some point things get so bad all you _can_ do is run away." He stood without looking at me, started walking to his room. "I'm going to sleep. Long day tomorrow. I'll keep worming my way in, see what I can get from them. Suggest you do the same, Trepe."

Then he left me there, sitting in the dark and the warm, with only the crackling of the fire and the wind whistling in the darkness outside for company. A part of me wanted to think _why didn't he ask, the Seifer I know would have jumped on that in a second,_ but the rest of me was just glad that he hadn't. Glad and a little grateful.

I stared into the depths of the fire, until my eyes ached from the strain and yellow-and-red spots danced in my vision when I blinked. If I closed them for long enough I could still see his eyes there, staring at me. After a while I stood, and went to my own room. Tried to get some sleep, and prepare for tomorrow.

* * *

_The dreams come hard and fast and sharp as knives. Like my old power is struggling up from deep inside my soul, and dragging this rotten memory with it like a diver hauling a dead fish to the surface. I can't do anything but watch as it ascends towards me, bringing up its grisly catch._

_I'm standing there, back in the office, in my own body but behind it, invisible and mute. Sat around the large oaken table with Squall and Cid and Xu, I can see all of the maps and papers and plans as clear as day. I can hear myself talking and scream to shut up, but I can't hear me._

"_I'll do it," I say._

"_Are you sure?" Squall asks. He looks worried for me, Hyne bless him. We've all been working overtime for weeks in the midst of the latest crisis, the latest betrayal. At this point we're beyond being angry at them, we just sigh and sharpen our blades and prepare to go to work. After Ultimecia's final defeat SeeD needed a purpose, and for its sins it found one. That's why we were in that room, what took me from there to that beach._

"_You're busy enough already," I hear myself say. "You need to stay visible here Squall, keep working where people can see you. I'll go." And all I can do is stand there and listen to myself smiling and talking, knowing I'm already feeling that aching nothingness inside me that the future is only going to make worse, and that the decision I just made at this table may have ruined me._

"_Keep your head up Quisty," Xu replies looking at me from across the desk, and even then I think she knew._

"_Don't worry about me," I reply. "I'll be fine," I lie._

_The rest of the dream is the beach, and all I can do is hope I wake up soon._


	9. Acceleration

There's a trick to fooling idiots. Doesn't matter if they're an office-worker from Deling or a general in the Esthar army. You tell them what you're going to do, or you tell them what you want to do. Then, when they ask why the hell you want to do it, you give them an answer _they wish they'd thought of first. _Works like a charm, every damn time.

"You headed out? To the mountains again?"

"Yeah," I replied to the guard. I know his name, I just can't recall it right now, although if he asked I could rattle off every other thing he'd told me about himself since I got here.

"It's pretty cold out there Almasy, what're you up there for anyway?" another one asks, and this one's name I do know. There's supposed to be no rank in the security volunteers in Havensden, it all runs off 'respect', whatever that nebulous term is supposed to mean. But I knew that was bullshit the second the bruiser in charge – Kurlen, who else? – introduced me to the group. His name's Kelly-something and he has that look in his eye. The kind the school bully has when a bigger kid turns up and starts talking. The same look people gave me and Raijin and Fujin, back at Balamb when we were on the Disciplinary Committee and caught another student running something they shouldn't. I wonder what kind of deals he's been doing under his boss's nose he thinks I'm going to try and muscle in on. He's big and brawny like the rest of Kurlen's gang because that's what he thinks soldiers look like. I could tell him stories about Esthar's soldiers, thin as whips and twice as fast, or Deling soldiers that could run miles in full gear and then fight for hours without a break afterwards. Or just introduce him to Trepe and see how long he lasted. If I gave a single shit about him.

Which I don't. "Yeah, well, I left some things up there," I say as I shrug the coat onto my shoulders. The one piece of clothing I'm prepared to love up here. I'd forgotten how _cold_ the north side of this miserable continent could be.

"What things?" Kelly blurts out at me. If this is his idea of an interrogation it's goddamn hilarious to watch.

"Well," I start, and know they'll buy it even as I say it, "I wasn't sure what kind of welcome I was going to get when I came up here." Heavy gloves over thinner gloves to keep the bite out. The single gun they gave me for patrolling the city is a piece of crap, I won't be taking it with me. "So I stashed most of my stuff somewhere I could find it, in case I had to make a quick getaway."

The nameless goon nods like it's the smartest thing he's heard all day. Hyne knew it may as well be.

"Seems to us like you already brought in the best thing you had, Almasy," Kelly pipes in, and laughs that infuriating goddamn nasally laugh he has. The others wait a beat and then join in. It sounds like some unholy goddamn chorus.

_If only you knew._

Used to be I'd get a kick out of that thought, but now their childish shit just makes me furious. "Yeah, well, a man can't live on bread and water alone right?" Apt, since sometimes that's all we get up here. Winter's always harsh, and Havensden isn't exactly an agricultural powerhouse. There are stores, I've seen them, but they're not exactly bursting like Deling City's silos.

"So _are_ you fucking her then?"

I recognise the voice instantly and batten down anger where the others won't see it. Kurlen looks over the room as he walks in out of the cold and even though the others can't see it I can. That little sneer he gets whenever he walks across his underlings. Kelly's already practically fawning over the man. "Boss," I say, careful to add respect I don't feel.

He looks me up and down and I can practically feel the sneer. It's pretty obvious he thinks he can take me although I have no goddamn clue why. "You going somewhere Almasy?" he asks, whatever joke he was going to make next forgotten.

"Shift's over, I'm taking off," I say. I don't want to waste words with these people, but I'm careful around him, and Diran. If they're just spectators to this whole Esthar-stolen-cargo-traitor mess then I don't want them getting in my way, and if they _are_ then I don't want them spooked, at least not until we're ready to jam our fists down their throats and pull.

"Hell, if he doesn't want her I'd be glad to take a shot," Kelly guffaws to his boss. Kurlen doesn't move an inch but I get the feeling he thinks as little of the man as I do. I wonder if Trepe has to deal with this over in the government buildings. Probably not. I've seen her walking around town, carrying papers and cases next to that tall drink of water, Kira or something. Some people get all the luck.

"She's taken," I snap back, and the man pulls back like someone just yanked on his chain. Even as I say it I feel bad though, and I don't know why. Maybe it's because she's the only other company up in this place that's halfway deserving of the name, even if we exchange maybe twenty words a night that isn't about the job.

_That week ago though…what the hell was that all about?_

"Not like you've even got the time," one of the other guards says as he takes off his greatcoat, thick with snowfall even though he's only been outside a few hours. The sun's going down and it will only get worse at night, pity the poor sods who're going to be out there in it. "Not with what we're-"

I hear the words and I'm already listening intently to him as he speaks, but Kurlen is faster. "That's enough outta you, get to work," the big man growls, and the man shuts his trap in a second.

"You giving out more shifts," I ask.

No use, he's not giving anything away. "Not to you, Almasy. Now shove off, your hours are up. Quartermaster'll have your pay."

I open the door to the wind and the snow and step out. I turn and close it behind me and catch Kurlen staring at my back. I meet his gaze as the steel swings shut, hold it until it closes.

They told us in SeeD training and I've heard it before then, but it's still funny how goddamn true it is. A plan's only as good as its dumbest member. Luckily some of the people running this place are really goddamn dumb.

* * *

It bugs me as I climb the path up the mountains. The road's broken and cracked and barely fit to step on but it's better than clambering up the steppes, and if anyone else is up here I want them to see me doing it. Kurlen doesn't trust me an inch and while I don't blame him it's goddamn annoying knowing someone's got their eyes on your back. My feet take it one step at a time as my brain works elsewhere.

There was something there alright and for some reason I just can't let it drop. Three weeks and starting since I got out of that Esthar prison and roped into this ridiculous scheme of Seagill's and that was the most emotion she's showed. It's not like she was ever short of the stuff anyway. I remember her back in Garden before the war and she liked to play the stoic older-sister figure - back in the Orphanage too for that matter – but eventually it always broke down if you pushed hard enough and you could get past that dumb act to the real person underneath. Hell by the time the war broke out I was a goddamn expert at breaking at doing it. During the war we were too busy trying to kill each other to talk much, but even then I always got the impression she took it more…personally…than the others. Our eyes met a couple of times, back during the Garden Fight, back in the Lunatic Pandora. I remember blue fire in those eyes, along with whatever crazy goddamn para-magic that she used to use.

I caught them a few times, afterwards. Not like you couldn't, really. None of the articles or shows ever really talked about the whole Sorceress thing, which made me wonder if Cid had the whole thing hushed up and shoved into a corner somewhere. Would make sense, especially if he didn't want any dumb hero-wannabes coming after him and his wife. The rest of it was there though, all glorious battles and last stands and amazing journeys through the world with the mysterious and heroic SeeD organisation and their Esthar allies. I'd be drinking or eating in some quiet bar that would take my money and I'd hear them clear as day, throwing out the same old platitudes and words at whatever microphone had been shoved in their face. They had all been there, all turned into some caricature of what they really were (although it was fucking hilarious to see Leonhart try and act like he had any kind of charisma or interest at all). She'd been there just like the others, the gracious and beautiful old sister. Then I'd stopped watching, just tried to get on with whatever life I had left with a bounty hanging over my head, even if they weren't trying very hard to catch me. When she turned up at that prison I'd thought it was some kind of disguise, the way it had fooled me for a moment. She'd looked tired, and angry.

Then we'd gotten up here and I'd gotten a really good look at her, and realised it wasn't a disguise at all. Not the same anger I'd seen in her back during the war, or the same tiredness you got at the end of a long day. She'd looked spent. Like she'd given up and was just going along for the ride. Something in the years since I'd gone-

_since you were kicked out and exiled_

-had ripped the life from inside her and left that stupid stoic shell behind. That conversation about running away had been the most fire I'd gotten from her in days and even that had been barely a smouldering ember compared to some of the fights we'd had in the old days. Why the hell was _that_ significant? What the hell did _she _have to run from? An actual for-real world hero?

_What the fuck happened?_

"Seifer."

I look up and she's already there waiting for me. I look down to check but there's no other footprints in the snow. She must have taken the ridges to get up here, coming up the cliff from somewhere else. Well at least she still has her skills, even if she's lost- drop it. "Let's just get this over with," I say, and shove the rest of my useless wondering out of my head.

"Nothing yet?" she asks as we work.

"Maybe," I reply. "One of them slipped up a little on the way out here. Not sure what it means though."

"They don't trust you yet, then?"

"Not the big man," I say, and I see her lips purse in frustration. I think about what those assholes were talking about as I left and wonder if any of them have made a pass at her yet. The thought annoys me. "Nothing on your end?"

The scowl deepens a little. "Nothing, nothing at all."

I shut up as we pull at the snow with our hands. It's been frustrating as hell. So frustrating I've had an idea, one that's been running through me as I came up here. On the one hand it's risky, but on the other hand it might get something done. We could spend years of our lives up here and get no farther than clerk and security guard. Well, I can bring it up with the man at least.

It takes us a few minutes to dig it out of a week of snowfall, but when our hands finally punch through the final millimetres of fall and hit metal the thing is only a little scuffled. The one thing we both agreed would be beyond stupid to even think about carrying down into the city, I watch as she unfolds the thing from its cage. Like a rose unfolding, and the insides of the petals are all shiny mirrors, with a small metal stick in the centre which extends upwards. I'd thought Kiros would just give us a phone or something, but I'll give the old bastard this, he's thorough.

"It's us," she says into the small handset."

His voice comes out clear as a bell from the other end, even in the snow. We're practically cheek to cheek in the setting sun as we sit around the small communication device. _"Anything new?"_ Seagill asks from hundreds of miles away. Probably in a heated room and a comfy chair too. Bastard.

"Nothing yet," Trepe reports, the good little soldier. She twists the little microphone over to me.

"Something, just a taste," I say. "I have an idea."

I can practically see him at the other end of the line – actually a satellite somewhere high in the air, but who cares in this weather – frowning and thinking about it. An idea, from Seifer? But I know he'll listen, that's the problem with all these oh-so-dedicated and proper soldiers and politicians. They have to at least hear you out, even if they want to tell you to shut up and go away. _"Go on,"_ Kiros says, and I can hear the tone there.

"Nothing's happening. I say we force something to happen, before whoever's shooting down your little birds gets an idea to shoot down some more, or expand their operations."

I can see Trepe gets it, although she doesn't know what exactly it is. _"Go on,"_ Kiros says from over a mountain range.

"We need confidence or we'll never get anywhere. They hate SeeD and Esthar, let's use that."

"Wait…" Trepe says, but I'm way ahead of her and already telling Kiros what to do.

"Attack them."

"_What!?_"

"_What?"_

One comes from Trepe, the other from Kiros. "We need them to trust us, let them know we're on their side and not just hiding out or whatever the hell it is they think we're- that _I'm _here for. Well, if we fought off an Esthar attack that would go a long goddamn way to convincing them." There's silence at both ends of the line as both of them think about it. Kiros will go for it, I know. Trepe I might have been able to tell if this was years ago, but now I'm not so sure.

"_You think I'm going to risk something like that?_" Kiros says over the line.

"We need to do _something._ You want all those lost ships turning up in a year as some kind of army?" I turn to Trepe. "You want that GF out there turning up doing the same thing?"

Days away I can practically see Kiros steepling his fingers and thinking about it. He's not like Laguna, not even close. Unlike his boss, Seagill is a military man and he wants this done and finished. If that means taking a couple of acceptable risks then he'll do it, especially if I'm the one who'll be at risk in the end.

Hell, maybe he hopes whoever he'll send will get some hits on me before they go down.

* * *

"It could backfire horrifically," Trepe says, but there's not really any passion or argument there. I wonder if she's every bit as frustrated with this wheel-spinning go-nowhere mission as I am.

"Not if we do it right." I'm sat back against a cold rock as we both sit there in the dark. Kiros's gone away to think about something – more likely to see exactly how badly things would go if they messed up – and said to hold on.

It hadn't taken much to convince Kiros it would work, because he was already halfway there himself. He had no trouble believing Kurlen didn't trust me, because _he_ didn't trust me. Which was fair enough really.

"What about his people?" Trepe asks.

"What about them?"

"For this plan to work the attack will have to be real, you know. What about the men he'll be sending that you'll be beating up?"

I laugh. It's strange but nice to know she doesn't think that _they_ might get one over on _me._ Nice to know at least some people still rate me that high. "It's their jobs, they'll get over it." I look down at her. "What's the matter Trepe? Never known you to spoil from a fight."

She blinks and her gaze slides away to the horizon. "It just seems excessive."

What the hell? "Oh come on, you can't tell me you really want to spend years living here just waiting for them to _maybe_ accept you? _Xu_ I could see doing that, but not you."

A crackle of static, and: _"Almasy."_

I turned away from her and picked the handset back up. "Here."

"_Two days."_

I'm surprised, and I can see that Trepe is too. "That fast?"

"_We had some people up near Trabia. We can ask them to swing by. What's our excuse."_

"That's simple," Trepe says. "Tell them they're investigating your crashed ships around the area." She meets my eyes. "Then, when your investigators get caught sticking their noses in where they shouldn't be, we can throw them out and be heroes." Nice to know her mind hasn't shut down at least.

"…_Are you sure about this, Quistis?"_ Asking her instead of me, that sneaky bastard.

"It's what there is," she says simply. "We have to do something."

"_Alright. Two days. Good luck."_

"Well, that was rotten," I say after we've heaped snow back up on the once-again spherical object. "Only two days, to get someone here from Esthar?"

"He has people close already," Trepe replies. "A team or something near here. But why?"

_Because he doesn't trust me._ _Because if this whole thing falls apart he wants to send the guns in to clean up whatever mess we leave behind us. Or recover our bodies. _"Who knows, but at least we won't have to wait." The coats we're wearing are warm but now, at the dead of night, the cold soaks through them to the skin. I shiver. "Let's get back." I start down the path, and I'm a little surprised when instead of taking her own route back she walks next to me. "Not worried about guards?"

Blue eyes look into mine, the rest of her face hidden by the scarf she's wearing, her hair flying back in the cold night wind. "What do _you_ think they'll think, seeing us come back together?"

Ah. "Good point." I feel a flush of heat in my face and in this cold it's roasting. We walk down the road in silence, the town laid out below us.

* * *

It feels like I ran a marathon yesterday, instead of sitting around and doing my normal patrol with the other mooks in the security division. Twenty-four hours of tension. Then…

"Listen up," Kurlen says as he practically crashes through the walls of the hut we're in, drinking coffee and waiting for the current shift to come in. He looks absolutely furious, and I smile a little inside. "We're about to get visitors."

"Who?" I ask first.

He glares at me like I just insulted his mother. "Esthar coming up through the mountains, say they're investigating something. I want you all suited up and ready for when they get here. On the gate, armed. Patrolling the city, the walls, any place they might think to take a look around."

The room turns into fury and motion and excitement as the others all start discussing exactly what they'll do to the Esthar 'visitors' if they try anything funny. Never mind exactly how badly they'd be out-tech'd or outgunned if it comes to that. Which it won't, because I'm going to get to them first.

Kurlen's staring at us all as we finish getting ready, and if it isn't my imagination he's staring at me in particular. "What?" I snap before I can stop myself.

"We don't usually get people like this comin' up so far north," he says in that strange accent-less drawl he has. If he was from anywhere before he came here, I can't tell now. "Maybe they're looking for something."

"Or someone. Me. Just say what you mean boss."

"I'm sure nobody meant anything," another voice calls out, and everyone looks around as Lyle Diren walks in. Even Kurlen shuts up and nearly salutes as the man just stands in the centre of the room and smiles. "I'm sure this is nothing," he repeats. "I'd just like to remind everyone that we have nothing but _respect_ for our southern neighbours." The way he says respect makes it sound like a dirty word, even through his grin. "_However,_" he goes on, "this is our territory and our city, and I'm sure you and the rest of the security team will be making certain that this fact is…enforced. That's all."

Kurlen waits for the councilman to walk back out before he starts glowering again, and when he does he sounds even angrier. No love lost there. "Alright, get to work. Don't let any of those fuckers get where they're not meant to be." He glances down at me and I wonder if he's going to say anything, but… "You too Almasy."

* * *

It's goddamn cold. Like even the weather is taunting me as the truck pulls up outside the Havensden gates. We're out in force alright, more people than I thought Kurlen had at his finger. A hundred or so maybe, guards and just civilians he's roped into carrying guns and manning the walls. The big man himself is standing there at the gate, arms crossed and scowling. The entire goddamn thing is theatre.

The truck idles to a stop, weird Esthar-tech engine whining to silence as it shuts down, and the first man climbs out. Now I know I was right about Kiros keeping a team nearby to clean up in case things go sour here. The same way I know the people behind me have never fought in real battle even though they're built like tanks, I can tell these thin and unshaven louts are the exact opposite. Then the last man climbs out, coat floating back in the breeze. Kurlen's nose flares in anger, and all I can think is _Kiros must think he's goddamn hilarious._

"Greetings," Kinneas says as he climbs down from the cabin and onto the snow. He's still moving stiffly, but I bet he'd have fought to come here in that goddamn wheelchair just to get the chance to see this. "I was told you knew we'd be coming?"

"Yeah, we did. What do you want?" He recognises him, and he's furious.

"We've been losing ships near here, we were wondering if your town- sorry, your city, had seen anything."

"Nothing to see up here." Short and straight to the point. Everything the briefing said about this places' reaction to SeeDs is true. "But take a look if you got to. Outside." The gates remain firmly closed.

Irvine looks around the place, but not at the guards. Then his gaze swings around and heads straight for me, and suddenly I know he was already warned. "Is that Seifer Almasy back there?" Nothing like when he was just talking, I can hear the anger there, and it's not feigned at all.

"That's not your jurisdiction."

"He's a wanted man."

"Not in our city."

"Big reward." He names a figure, I didn't even know it had went that high.

A couple of people around start muttering, but one glare from Kurlen silences it. It's got them thinking though, and that's what it was meant to do.

Kinneas' hands twitch, just a little bit, and I feel a twitch of my own that I have to force down before I end up drawing on him. "Well, that's one huge problem you're letting yourselves in for," the cowboy-wannabe says, and I know he means it.

Kurlen's patience is gone. "But not yours. Get your work done and leave."

He tips that stupid hat of his. "Sure thing buddy," is the last thing he says before he turns away. But before he does so he looks right at me again, and I swear to god he _winks_ at me. I know what he's up to now, and I have to resist a smile. Our little plan is going to go ahead alright, but it isn't going to be just some faceless Esthar mooks who're going to invade and be conveniently met by me and thrown out. For some reason, either payback or orders or just the thrill of the chase, Kinneas is going to make sure we meet up later tonight. Well, if he thinks he can play around with me he's going to be sorely mistaken. I wonder if Trepe would have some harsh words for her adopted brother if she knew what he was up to.

Well, I'll be looking forward to it.


	10. Kiss - Part 1

I don't remember when I started liking the dark more than the day. I used to relish summer, used to take any excuse to get out there in the air and sun. Especially on Balamb, where it seemed like some days there was a giant magnifying glass placed _just so_ over the island, and the sun shone down through it like waves of warmth and light. Days so hot the cadets would sweat in their uniforms, shift and tug at them in uncomfortable seats, until eventually class would have to be called for the day and the student body would gratefully rush for the door, to spend the rest of the day sunning themselves on the steps of the quad, and the older students with passes would take the long winding road down to the harbour and the beaches nearby.

Now I go out in the daytime, through the snow that even on hot days never quite seems to melt away this far up north, and the light around me feels harsh and cold somehow, reflecting from the snow no matter where I look and piercing through the air to stab at my eyes. I squint against it and do what I have to do as quickly as I can, before retreating back into the safety of artificial light-bulbs or, in some of Havensden's newer houses, candles. When the day is over I walk home in semi-darkness, feeling better than I do walking to my job in daylight.

But not tonight.

I know why of course. Seifer's out there somewhere, and so is Irvine. I'd railed against them both when Seifer had come back to the house at dusk and told me about the meeting. I didn't know who I was more angry at; Irvine for this ridiculously childish display of machismo, or Seifer for going along with it. I knew they both would though, no matter what I said, even if I _could_ have found some excuse to visit the Estharian 'delegation' outside the city walls and speak with him. I knew Irvine better than anyone else except Selphie, and neither of us could have said why sometimes the man could just…go off like this. Like Zell, really. Most of the time the cowboy skated through life on his – not inconsiderable I had to admit – skill and easygoing personality, more at home with following than leading. But sometimes he would just fixate on something, and then he wouldn't stop until whatever it was, was fixed. Now, somehow, Irvine Kinneas had decided that somehow he had a score to settle with Seifer Almasy. And Seifer Almasy was going to oblige him. In the middle of an undercover operation with SeeD's reputation and power, and Esthar's technology at stake, they were going to go behind the bike-sheds and fight it out like schoolboys.

And just like schoolboys one of them was going to get hurt.

_Is that why this whole thing bothers you so much? Why you're sat here by the window instead of asleep and oblivious?_

_Yes,_ I admitted to myself, it was.

_Which one?_

Both of them, of course. I didn't want Irvine captured and cornered by Kurlen and his tame muscle, not with the way the people in Havensden almost spat the word 'SeeD'. And I certainly didn't want Seifer gunned down by some uninformed Esthar soldier just trying to protect his squad-mates. Both of them were out there somewhere in the snow, playing their own little game on top of the plan that Kiros was conducting above us. Irvine was my little brother, and Seifer…Seifer had been one of my students once, and somehow the thought of a pupil fighting with my family annoyed me.

The more I thought about it the more I thought the whole plan had been a spectacularly bad idea, and I blamed myself. Maybe the entire thing had been going slowly, with the two of us going half stir-crazy with frustration. But that was no excuse for hasty decisions like this. I cursed myself for it, and stood. I shucked off the oversized and badly-sewn cloth shirt I'd been using as a makeshift set of pyjamas and climbed back into the my work-clothes. I glanced outside as I was changing. The sun had gone down hours ago, and outside the only lights came from other houses, and from the few streetlights that people had assembled and strung up along the main roads. Everything else was pitch black. At least I wouldn't be seen.

_Why bother Quisty? Why not just let it happen? Let them get it out of their system. Caged tigers need to let off their stress once in a while, and he hasn't exactly got the same…freedoms…he would have if he was here on his own-_

_Enough of that._

I shook my still-drying coat from over the fireplace and put it on. I couldn't just sit here anymore and wait, like some housewife in a Galbadian serial waiting for her solider to come home. The role didn't suit me. If the two of them wanted to play at schoolboys, so be it. Time for a teacher to step in and push them apart, before things got any worse than bloody noses.

* * *

"I…Imalia?"

You had to be kidding. I knew I was stood there on my own doorstep and gaping, and shut my mouth hopefully before she could notice. "Kira!" I tried to give the impression that opening my door and finding her stood on the other side, one hand already up and about to knock, was a pleasant surprise rather than just a surprise. I forced a smile. "What are you doing here?" _What the _hell_ are you doing here?_

The nervous woman blinked and smiled back, like a small bird realising the cat she'd come across wasn't about to devour her. Although I was sorely tempted. Every nerve in my body was on fire, and I wanted to be _away._ "I just…I noticed the light was on, on my way back. I…umm…I was wondering if everything was alright. With the…with the _Estharians_ near the town."

It would have been adorable if it hadn't been so utterly infuriating. "No. I just left some things at work, personal things. I was headed back to pick them up."

Kira frowned under her scarves and clutched her bag like it was a shield against the bloodthirsty foreigners stalking the streets. "Are you sure it's _safe?"_

_Oh for Hyne's sake they're not ghouls,_ I wanted to say, and held it back. "I'm sure the guards will keep everything quiet," I lied. I stepped off the doorframe and Kira stepped back unconsciously. I felt a little bad doing it but I had absolutely no time for the woman, not tonight. "I have to get going, in case they lock up before I get there," I said, as forcefully as I dared. I turned and walked away, the last thing I heard from her a tiny 'good luck' as I walked away into the darkness of the city. I glanced back once and saw Kira there, still at the door, still staring after me like a lost thing fading away with the rest of the street.

Then I was gone.

SCENE BREAK

It seemed like the Esthar/SeeD visit Kiros had arranged had split Havensden into two groups, with me at the centre looking at both as I passed them by on the dark street. My feet crunched the newly-fallen snow and more than once not just my own. I would hear muffled speaking or forced laughter in the darkness, and then looming out of the night they would walk past me; groups of men – never women – all striding through the streets and talking loudly about what they'd do if they caught anyone _else_ striding through the streets. Most of them were clearly hiding something nasty in their clothing, and I wondered what Kurlen thought about people walking about with weapons _without_ his permission.

_You know he probably encouraged it._

The other group was simple and invisible. Everywhere I walked that usually had at least a little light shining through the doors or windows was barred solid and dark. Maybe the people were afraid Esthar had come for _them, _for whatever real or imagined crime that had made them run from the other cities to this self-made one.

"_Hey you!"_

I turned and froze as I saw them walking towards me. Their breath steamed in the cold of the night, and for a second I wondered…

Whoever he was he was angry, and from that red nose a bunch of that anger was coming from whatever he had drunk that night. He could have been one a dozen interchangeable groupies I'd seen walking past me tonight, on the way to the centre of the city. "Didn't we tell you people to stay the hell out?" He jabbed a finger into my coat as he spat the words.

"I don't-" My voice stopped in my throat as I realised what the angry man was saying. "I'm not with the Esthar people," I said.

Behind him, one of his comrades who'd evidently drank a lot less than the big man just shook his head as he looked at me. "Nah. I've seen her, walking around the town. She just looks like one," one of the group said.

I watched as they walked off, and shivered. _They thought I looked like an Estharian._ Back before this rotten nightmare, back in Esthar's warm deserts, I'd have smiled at that. Now, in the dead of night in the middle of a city that hated it, I shivered at the thought. I'd known it of course, had seen Irvine's look of shock – and Seifer's too – back in the south. It felt strange though, to be confronted with it. I wondered if-

"Tre- Imalia?"

Suddenly I heard it, a clear note in the muffled night. I looked and saw him, stood at the end of an ally. Wrapped up in a huge greatcoat, a blaring orange lantern in one hand and a rifle in the other. I checked the street and ducked in, the final lights from the central road vanishing until the only light in the world was coming from Seifer's light. "Good evening."

"What the hell are you doing?" he hissed at me. I could see the light from the lantern reflected in his eyes, orange-on-orange. Not angry though, he looked more confused than anything.

"Making sure you don't do something stupid," I whispered back.

Closer to the centre and away from the main roads, the city was a maze of alleys. The first settlers had arrived and simply built where they pleased, and the result had been a crazy mess as later, when power and water had finally been installed and turned on, they had been forced to simply string the wires and pipes around what was there. Now I walked through them as Seifer patrolled, just waiting for the rendezvous we both knew was coming. "Making sure _I_ don't do anything stupid?" he muttered, as we walked deeper into that maze. He held the lantern before him like a beacon, which, I realised, he probably meant it to be. "I shouldn't have told you about that goddamn cowboy," he muttered, so quietly I almost didn't catch it.

"It would be inconvenient if you got hurt," I settled for saying, and smiled under my scarf when he rounded on me in surprise.

"If _I_ got hurt? You think old cry-'n'-shoot could take me." He seemed genuinely insulted by the thought.

"I'm not willing to find out," I replied.

"Thanks for your concern Instructor."

"I'm not your Instructor anymore," I say through chattering teeth.

"Sure goddamn act like it sometimes."

"Well someone has act like an adult around here," I hissed back, the cold making my teeth ache.

"That always was your problem, _Quisty_."

It brought me up short. Hardly anyone called me that, not even the rest of my adoptive family. Selphie, sometimes, when she's exceptionally cheerful and doesn't catch herself. To everyone else I'm Quistis, or Instructor Trepe. Just hearing the name from him brings back memories of the old stone orphanage we grew up in. Not all of them bad ones either. "What's that ssssupposed to mean," I managed to say. God, it really was cold, I should have put dry clothes on instead of the damp ones from today. If I get a cold when-

Seifer's overcoat lands on my shoulders like a bear draping itself over me. "Here," his voice says. For a second I consider throwing it off, or giving it back. Then the warmth from it – his warmth, I realise – envelops me, and I have to hold back a sigh as I bunch it up in the front and the cold is held off, at least for a moment. "Rookie mistake," Seifer says, lantern still high, but flame now held just a little closer to him.

"Thanks," I said, and meant it.

"Be pretty dumb if you got a cold and I had to do this whole thing on my own."

"You look adorable."

_That _I hadn't expected, and I was about to open my mouth to say so when I realised Seifer hadn't been the one to say it. Faster on the uptake than me – and it hurt a little bit to admit it – he was already turning towards the new voice in the back-alleys of Havensden. He hadn't gone for his gun though, he had already recognised it as well.

* * *

"No really. It's cute, almost," Irvine said, leaned up against a brick wall. I wondered how long he'd been following us before he'd decided to introduce himself. He'd traded in his traditional cream-coloured duster for something more suited to the cold, a blue-ish leather military greatcoat, emblazoned with Esthar's logo, and huge stomping boots. The hat was still there though. Sometimes I wondered if he glued the thing to his head.

"Finally, thought you'd changed your mind, you were taking so long," Seifer said as he lowered the heavy lantern. He rubbed his hands together, and then gestured down a street I hadn't even noticed. "Come on."

"So what brought you out as well Quistis?" Irvine asked as the two of us walked after Seifer. Every so often he'd stop and check at the end of alleys. This light now there was no other noise, and the only people were the city patrols we avoided easily. We walked through the back of the city, three plotting ghosts. "Want to record the result for posterity?"

"Want to stop you two making asses of yourselves," I replied. Seifer grunted, and it could have been a chuckle or just nothing.

"Oh?" Irvine said, and he looked surprised. "Kiros told me this was your plan."

This time it wasn't a chuckle as Seifer spoke. "_Her _plan?"

Irvine looked from the other man to me, and I just nodded. He frowned. "Well, I probably wouldn't have come up here if he'd told me _that._" I had to resist the urge to laugh. Another poor sap duped by the Esthar leader. He was almost as good as Xu at getting people to do what he wanted.

Finally the twisting maze ended, and the last ally fell behind us to reveal the small square. No more than a few meters on any side, it looked like houses had just backed up one each other until this was the only space left, useless and unusable. A single tree grew at the centre, some unknown person's attempt to make the place just a little more pleasant. In winter though it just looked dead and forlorn.

Seifer put down the lantern on the floor and stretched his arms out dramatically. "Alright, let's get on with this." Irvine did the same and I just had to shake my head at the sheer absurdity of it all.

"The two of us just stop alright, _just stop."_ They both stopped and stared at me, and for a second it all came flooding back, past the old GF amnesia and all the history between now and childhood. How many times had I done this back in the ocean-front orphanage? Even as a child I'd been stopping fights, corralling the others.

_And nothing's changed._

Anything else I would have said was lost though, as the _crump_ of heavy boots on snow came steadily from the ally we had just gone down.

Irvine looked from the mouth of the ally to Seifer. "You thought you'd finish me off _this_ quickly?"

Seifer was somewhere between anger and embarrassment. I was a little closer to worried. The sounds had divided now, there had to be two of three people down there. I could hear the dull muffle of people trying to talk through cloth, and the _clink_ of cold iron hitting brick. "I didn't call them pre-emptively you dumbass. We're just unlucky."

"We'll be unluckier if they find the three of us talking!"

"Hide." Irvine ducked into what mediocre cover there was, leaving Seifer and I standing there, a giant red lantern at our feet and nowhere else in the tiny square to go to.

_Another dead-end? How appropriate._

Finally I'd had enough of it, the little voice in the back of my head that had been needling away at me all week, like something small and nasty that had taken up residence in my brain and that I couldn't dig out. The sound of the footsteps was closer now and I could almost see the glint of their rifles in their hands as the patrol came around the last corner towards the square we were stood in. I acted before that small voice could tell me not to, and grabbed the collar of Seifer's coat. I caught Irvine out of the corner of my eye looking amazed and disbelieving, but I ignored him.

"Hey what the hell-" was all Seifer could manage, before my lips met his. I caught his eye and watched the shocked expression turn to understanding, and then I closed my own as I pressed closer to him.

_Almasy, what the hell are you- oh. Wondered what you-_

It was only there for a half-second, a deliberate tableaux that only needed to last that long to fool the bumbling security patrol that had stumbled on us. I pulled back as I heard their voices, the taste of his lips on mine, heat and something coppery, gone as soon as it had arrived. The sounds before us had stopped and from the corner of my eye I could see them. Four men who could be anyone wrapped up like that, rifles hanging by their sides. From the _very_ corner of my eye I could see Irvine trying to be as small as possible, a small pistol in one hand and an expression of intense concentration on his face. I squeezed Seifer's hand in mine. _Play along._

He was well ahead of me. God, at that moment I could have kissed him again. Seifer stared out at the other guards. Stared them down. "I'm on a break, do you mind?" he said, disdain clear in his voice.

A couple of them were staring at me, and I looked down at the ground to avoid it, hair falling over my eyes to stop them getting a better look. My lips still felt tingly from that momentary contact, and his arm was still around my waist. I ran my tongue around my lips without thinking about it and could still feel the residual heat there, like standing near a fire. It tingled in the cold.

"Er...yeah, sure," one of them said. "Just don't let the boss catch you and…whatever. Alright?"

They shuffled away, all together, like well-wrapped penguins suddenly presented with a polar bear. I l waited until the sound of their footsteps crumpling the snowfall underfoot was gone, and only then did I let go of the sigh I didn't realise I'd been holding in. My breath spiralled out in the freezing air like a small tornado.

"Well, that was unorthodox," Irvine said, climbing to his feet and shaking the snow from his coat. I couldn't help but notice even though he was trying his best to act nonchalant he was still almost whispering.

I glanced up at Seifer, who stared back down at me. The amazement on his face when our lips had met was gone now, replaced with the usual expressionless calculation I knew better. "Thanks," I said, and wondered what he'd say back.

I could have smiled. If the surprise was gone from his face, it was still there – a little bit – in his voice. "Don't mention it."

"God, well now I just feel downright impolite," Irvine said, looking every way but at the two of us.

"Well, are you going to continue your little-boys-show?" I asked, looking away from Seifer and adjusting my clothes. I was still wearing his coat over my shoulders, I realised.

The cowboy just shrugged, more snow coming off his coat. "Nah," he said. "Somehow now I really don't feel like it."

I could have thanked him, but it would only have made him more awkward. All three of us were silent for a moment, just standing there in the clearing hidden away in the depths of the home-made city.

"So how is everyone?" I asked. Oh God Quistis really? It sounded so silly in my ears.

Either he didn't pick up on it or he did and spared me. "Back home?" he said, and it took me a second to realise he was talking about Balamb,

Not Esthar.

"Well, everyone was kind of relived after Galbadia signed that peace-treaty." Seifer snorted, and Irvine just nodded. "Yeah, well, we're paying close attention this time. Squall and Rinoa are over at Timber and Dollet every few days just to show the colours. Selphie and Zell on 'guard duty' for any diplomats wandering around Deling." I knew that trick. They'd be called bodyguards or security personnel, but the message was loud and clear; We're Watching You. That would have been Xu's suggestion.

"What are you doing to stop them breaking it again?"

For a second Irvine looked annoyed, or maybe even angry, as Seifer asked the question. Then he just shrugged. "Whatever we can. Boats full o' SeeDs on the coastlines near the battles. Squall has the Garden hovering around random spots every few days like a giant shell-shaped patrol, scares the shit out of the Galbadians I'll tell you that."

It sounded good. But then it always did.

"You oughta look at fixing that problem for good one day," Seifer said.

Irvine's antipathy to the man seemed to vanish as it was replaced by frustration. "Yeah well, if you got an idea be sure to tell us how."

"Two words.

"This I have to hear.

"Take. Over."

Irvine snorted. "And replace them with who."

"Who cares? I'm sure Dollet would like the land." Seifer shrugged, copying the cowboy from earlier. "Galbadia's a fighting animal, always has been. You knock it down and it'll just get up again when it heals, make another shot at it."

"You'd know all about that of course," Irvine said.

Seifer stared into Irvine's eyes and I knew my adopted brother was seeing the same thing I had, the last time a conversation with him had turned serious like that. Intensity, and a fire there that Seifer never had when he was just playing around. "Yeah," he said. "I do."

To that Irvine didn't seem to have a response. Instead… "Kiros asked if you needed anything."

"Only time," I said, before Seifer could open his mouth and say something we'd both regret.

Irvine looked over our heads. The underside of the clouds were showing just a tint of red, as finally the dawn threatened to break over Havensden. "Well, that you have plenty of up here."

That tripped something in me. Suddenly it seemed like a good time to go. I could still feel something on my lips from the kiss I'd forced on Seifer, and he was still standing close to me. Somehow I didn't feel the need anymore to step aside. "Speaking of Kiros, and plans…"

Seifer nodded. "Good point, time we were leaving." He reached out the hand holding the lantern to Irvine, as his other hand rooted around in his pant pocket for something. "Could you…"

Irvine took it, without a second thought. "Sure, what are you looking f-"

He never finished the sentence, as his hand, now-lanternless, came around and smacked Irvine's head, in a textbook-perfect strike to his temples. For a half-second he stood there looking confused, and then without a word, then with a soft _oooh_ he dropped to the ground, and stayed there.

Seifer brought his hand from his pocket, and I saw the small red flaregun hidden in his palm. I just shook my head in wonder. "You unbelievable man."

He didn't say anything, just pointed the small pistol straight up, and then the remainder of the night was driven away as blazing orange light filled the sky above us. He looked down into my eyes, that cocky grin on his face. The same one I'd seen a hundred times over the years, before things all went to hell and it was replaced with a leer. Just seeing it I felt ten years younger. He spoke, and he sounded happy.

"Mission accomplished."

Suddenly the framework holding me up all night collapsed. All the tension, confusion, excitement and suspense, from leaving the house to the strange meet-up in the alleys, the strange hot sensation of feeling Seifer's lips on mine. It all came crashing down on my head in a surge of adrenaline and fatigue. All I could think of doing was laughing at the entire absurdity of the whole thing.

So I did.


	11. Stolen Things

Bit of a late update today. Hope the content makes up for it.

* * *

"_Oww,_ careful."

"Stop complaining," she says, "or I'll have to start again."

She cinches the bandage a little tighter and I wince, not saying anything this time as it feels like a vice closes around my ribs. When I first came up here I wished for a lot of stuff, didn't really occur to me I might end up wishing for some half-decent medical supplies as well. Goddamn place might as well be back in the dark ages… "Are you done yet?"

"I'll be done when I tell you I'm done," she replies, frowning just a little bit.

"Why don't you just use that Blue crap and patch me up that way?" I ask, and see what she…

"And what happens when you turn up to work whole and healthy?" Trepe replies. "No, we use this."

She's lying. I suspected it before, I'm pretty certain now. There's been a half-dozen times in the last week, before our little smack-up-Almasy plan, it would have come in useful with no drawbacks, and every time she's made some excuse. Either she won't use it or she can't, and that's a little worrying. I still remember facing down that power a couple of times, back during the Second War. Raijin had a bloody great scar from it when they met in Balamb. It would be useful as hell, I was counting on that shit to come through when we finally got to grips with the GF-thief. Without magical backup things could get a little awkward.

"There." She finishes and stands up straight, brushing hair from her eyes. "That'll hold you together."

Goddamn Kinneas, had to have the last laugh. Maybe if I'd known the rest of his little Esthar-troupe was nearby and just waiting for us to kick off I wouldn't have cold-cocked him as hard as I did. Or maybe I'd have done it harder. Either way I bet the bastard was laughing inside when they finally ran after giving back to me as good as I got to him. I'm pretty sure a couple of these ribs are cracked, and this bandage on my forehead is gonna be there for a while. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it, just be ready," she says, and turns away to fiddle with whatever she has on that bench.

_Is that it?_ I want to ask, but don't. I'm unsure, unsure and I don't like it. I just know if I try and bring it up she'll have some excuse prepped and ready to go. It'll be something about the mission or logical courses of action, or maybe even something about the quickest thing she could think of at the time. Maybe it'll even be a good enough reason to fool the rest of her trusting little adopted family. But not me.

There was passion there. One that I can still remember. During the Second War when the only times we met each other where when she was chasing after me in Timber, and then only afterwards trying to kill each other – really kill, no matter what half-legends they talk about in the papers – across half the world. Afterwards they all got their little nicknames and personalities, forced onto everyone to reduce them down from normal people into heroes. Squall; the brave lion, which even at the time could have made me burst out laughing. A man so bloodless he barely knew how to talk with teammates made into some kind of commanding figure. Rinoa earned her little moniker at least. I knew her before Squall did – something he never forgave me for, but fuck him – and she always had been a princess. Even if she hadn't been Garden-trained she how to command, to lead and get what she wanted. Why she ended up wanting Squall I never figured out, but she got him just as well. The less said about me, the better. A few of the braver ones tried hunting me down for whatever it is journalists do, but none of them got very far, I made damn sure of that. I didn't care what they wrote about me, or about me and Squall. Maybe there was a rivalry once, but it's long dead and gone now. He won it. The old me wouldn't have been able to say that, but the old me was the one who started it in the first place and look where it got him, me. I have my pride, but I'm not totally fucking stupid.

And Trepe, the ice queen. What a joke. Anyone who ever really knew her knew how much garbage that was. They tried to paint her as an unapproachable glacier, some kind of older sister-stroke-voice of reason, and I knew she let them not because they were right, but because she didn't give a damn what people thought about her. The ice was a thin cover for outsiders and she hid the fire underneath, that she only brought out for her best friends and her worst enemies. Even when we fighting I never figured out whether she hated me or whether she just felt sorry for me. Back then the thought just made me even more furious, taunted her about it. She thought it was her fault how things ended up, and I was perfectly fine with her thinking that. Back in the orphanage she wanted to be responsible, well let her be responsible for this. I remember fighting her, blade against magic, and those blue eyes were like diamonds and she spat blue fire and strange power from the air around her. Ever since then; nothing.

That kiss – that strange goddamn kiss – is the first I've seen of her fire since we met back in that Esthar prison. Weeks of playing the good little lady and then suddenly for the first time there's some emotion there besides annoyance – god she's still good at that one, at least – or just disinterest. Even when she met up with Irvine I could see it, that slightly cool withdrawal when they hugged, and I think he saw it too. He knows something I don't, and that's annoying because he's not likely to tell me since I sucker-punched his lights out.

I want to know. I want to know more than I want to deal with this dumb crap Kiros has roped me into, more than I want to know whatever piddling crap Kurlen and his goons and this backwards town are up to. More than I want to find out about SeeD's traitors or stolen GFs or any of the reasons we're up here in this godforsaken ice-hole, set up by a bunch of farmers and anarchists. It's only been one day and I can still remember how it felt. She felt cold, at first, but near the end just before she stepped back there was just a little bit of warmth. Not fire, but something closer to the old Trepe I still remember than the strange cold creature I've been living with for the past few weeks. Suddenly I care more about this, right in front of me.

"Trepe?"

"What, Seifer?" she asks, not looking around at me.

"What the hell's the matter with you?"

She rounds on me. "Ex_cuse_ me?"

"You've been acting weird since we got here, I want to know why," I start, and I can already see her starting to frown and pout, just a little bit. She's going to deny it no matter what so I ignore it and power on through. "Since before, really. You've been moping around since Esthar and you've been like a machine in here. You've been-"

"I don't get what you-"

"You've barely shown any kind of emotion since we got here, hell last night was probably the most I've heard you change from dead-neutral in weeks."

"That hardly seems im-"

"Now you're telling me you won't use magic even though you damn well know we're going to need it to get through this."

"That isn't what I-"

"And now you're making out with me in the dead of night, which hey while I don't mind so much is more Rinoa's MO and not yours."

"Seifer-"

"Did they replace you with some kind of Trepebot while I was away, because right now I'm wondering-"

"Seifer."

"-if you can even do the job-"

"_SEIFER!"_

Finally. She's looking at me now and there's something there besides ice and nothing. The hair is still strange and different and the clothes are ugly and old, but the angry flush in the skin is the same, and the eyes are something other than just flat and pale blue orbs. Not sapphires, not like they were. But better. "So what the hell is going on, Trepe?" I ask.

She takes a deep breath. "You," she says, "have some goddamn nerve."

"At least I have functioning nerves," I shoot back. "This isn't you Trepe. We both know it. Was it back in Balamb, or Esthar?"

"That is _none_ of your goddamn business."

I don't know how I got here but suddenly I'm right there, standing over her, looking slightly down into her eyes. I forget how I'm taller than she is, standing far away, talking to each other across a gap in the room. This is serious shit we're playing around in, with me at the sharp end. Fuck her if she wants to play mind-games with me. "Just what the hell happened to you Trepe?"

"What does it matter?" she says, and I have to lean closer just to hear it, she's whispering so quietly.

"It matters to _me_ if you're going to get me killed!" I say back.

For maybe half a second I can see it, see it in her eyes and her voice and her body as she slumps underneath me just a little. She licks her lips like she's about to admit something, looking into my eyes. I'm aware of how close I'm standing. I can feel her breath against me, feel the brush of her clothes against mine. Suddenly I can see it right there in front of me; she desperately _wants_ to tell me, or at least tell someone, whatever it is that's chained her up inside her own head like she is, and I know she hasn't even told Kinneas or Squall or any of her other little troupe. If only I knew the goddamn words to push her the final inch of the way. I lean in closer again. There's no room between us now, no place for either of us to run, way inside each other's personal space. "What's wrong, Quistis?" I ask. Her first name sounds strange crossing my lips. I haven't said it in years.

Then, a knock sounds at the door, and the spell's broken as fast as it was there.

The moment's gone.

Whoever's on the other side of this door had better be goddamn important or he's-

"Almasy. Suit me and come with me," Kurlen says into my face. He's all dressed up, the semi-military coat on his back all cleaned up like he's about to be on parade. There's a car behind him, or at least what passes for a car out here, and two of his underlings I don't recognise standing by it. "Leave your stuff here."

This is it, then. I glance back once at Trepe. She's stood there staring at the two of us. She just nods at me, once. I grab my own, much more scruffy, coat from the rack, and head out without another word.

Goddamnit.

* * *

"You did good work."

He's talking but I'm barely listening. I've heard all his crap a dozen times now and the more I hear it the more convinced I am Kurlen is just a puppet dancing to strings from above. He's talking one thing at me while his eyes are saying another, glaring at me like I've just stolen his favourite toy. Which I might have. "Thanks," I say, staring out the window as the town rolls by to either side. We're headed to the centre, but not _the_ centre. I've never been to this part of the makeshift city yet but it's much the same. The houses are made of thick stone and wood instead of concrete, but the haphazard placement and wiring is the same. This must be one of the oldest areas, when Havensden was just a bunch of huts and fields in a clearing, and a handful of people trying to scrape out a new life.

He doesn't smile or acknowledge my thanks, only glares a little more before going back to looking at the road. The guards come to attention as we draw up to a set of gates, and without a sound from the big man we're through, out of the snow and into a tunnel that slopes down gently into the earth. It's newer than the building surrounding it though.

"So, where we headed?" I ask, as in front of us the path straightens out. Kurlen doesn't say a damn word though, just keeps going. It's a tunnel built under the earth, going on for what must be a good two or three miles judging by this speed. We're already outside the city walls, shame I don't know in which direction. The mountains start a few miles from the city centre, so if…

"Get out," Kurlen barks at me, and I realise we've stopped. I do same, and get a look at the building we've entered. It's a storehouse, just like any of the others in the city. Bags of grain and flour and other miscellaneous junk line the walls, and the entire room smells sickly-sweet, like honey left out too long. Kurlen goes to the back of the room and I follow like a good little dog.

"Here, and stay quiet," is all he says, pressing against the wall, and I realise part of this rocky and old surface is a door he's pushing in. Interesting. If it…

Huh. How about that.

"Not bad," I say as we roll through, and behind us the door shuts, this side of it coated in steel. Good trick, and I can see why it's been done. It's a storehouse alright. But this side of it isn't holding food, or clothes or farming implements or any of the other crap in the rest of the city.

_Seagill was right._

"Almasy, welcome aboard."

_And so was I._

Lyle Diran's walking towards me across the concrete floor like he's meeting a long-lost son. He puts his hand out and I shake without thinking as he waves his other hand around the room. "What do you think?" he asks, like he's showing off a prize flowerbed or something.

It's from Esthar, I can see that much. Even with edges burned off or twisted and half of it looking like someone took a buzzsaw to it (badly), it still has that weird look to it. All smooth and shiny and not entirely solid, like if you put it under a hot lamp it would melt. Just looking around the room we've walked into I can recognise armour-plating laid out on tables, electronics and circuit-boards stacked up on shelves that line the room. I do some quick working-out in my head and it comes to the answer I knew it would.

"Looks like you have half an Esthar shipyard in here," I say. Kurlen frowns, but Diran just keeps smiling.

"Yes, we're quite proud of our salvage," he says, and then switches gear. "Kurlen tells me you did well for us, a couple of nights back."

Kurlen's twitch off to my side tells me that's bullshit, and I file it away for later use. Diran has his own man on the inside of the security forces, feeding him information. He doesn't trust him entirely either, nice to know. "I did what I was told, more or less," I reply.

"Well, sending those Esthar trespassers home with a few knocks counts as 'more' in this situation, I think," Diran says. "Sit down, have a coffee."

God, it feels weird sitting here. Someone's put an actual honest-to-god sofa in one corner of the room, and just like the councilman says there's a pot of coffee there too. "What's this all about?" I ask.

Diran steeples his hands and stares at me over them. "You're not a regular immigrant to our town Mr Almasy, so I'll spare you the usual speech. You don't need it. You know what it's like to be hunted, to be excluded. So do most of our citizens, in some way or another, and they came up here for security. To know there was a place that was theirs. Most of them would go far to protect that security. I would, Mr Kurlen here would. We both know how far you've been before, Seifer," he says, and leans towards me. That smile is a little more predatory now, a little less statesmanlike. "Would you go that far again?

You can't be serious. "Is that what this is?" I ask, and wave a hand back at the shelves of stolen technology. This can't be all of it, not with the amount of transports Esthar have lost. There have to be more warehouses like this, somewhere out there. "Security?" I drink up. It tastes awful. "Not to put too fine a point on it councilman but while this is a little impressive it's not _that_ impressive. What are you assuming, Esthar attack and you hold them off?"

"Yes," Kurlen growls, and I laugh.

"Even assuming they do something so dumb, how would you fight back? Throwing plating down on top of them? Or tossing circuitry at them and hoping they die of tetanus?"

Kurlen ignores me, looks over at his boss. "I told you this cocky fucker was no good."

Diran ignores him, keeps staring at me. "This is only a holding area, Seifer. We have more than this, much more."

This is it. I'm closer now. I just wish Quistis was here to know how right we both were. "Like what?" I ask. "Ignoring the fact that Esthar and Trabia have zero reason to screw with you in the first place."

Diran leans back on the cheap sofa and stares at me. In here, in the warmth and away from the blinding snow, I can see his eyes properly now. They're hard eyes, like I've seen in Kiros and Xu and a half-dozen other soldiers. I wonder whether he got them before coming up here, or after. "And if we knew they were?" he asks.

_They are because you're stealing their shit. _"No way."

Diran glances at the big man and nods. Without a word Kurlen strides to one of the shelves, and drags something from the wall. I recognise it instantly. He brings it back over and shoves it down onto the ground, and I pretend to be nonplussed. "What's this?"

"An Esthar spy-device," Diran says, as he picks up the ball of tech and antennas that me and Quistis brought with us to Havensden. "One we found in the mountains, just a few days ago. Esthar and Trabia want us gone, don't doubt it Seifer," Diran says, putting the ball onto the table between us. "They want us gone because to them we're just a collection of criminals and squatters on their land. The other nations too."

"You want my help," I say, not a question.

"Your expertise," he replies, and then he explains what he wants.

I tap a finger and pretend to consider it. I'm already in of course, but I can't look too eager. I give it a couple of seconds, then; "You want my help for something that involves pissing off Esthar, I'll need incentives" I say. "I've been running for a long time and I'm sick of it. Convince me to help you."

"Accomplish this," Diran says, "and I think you'll find that home you've been looking for. That and much more."

"Deal," I say.

"Don't fuck with us on this Almasy," Kurlen says, and I ignore him. I'm dealing with his boss now, and all three of us know it.

"So what the hell are you- are _we_ up to then?" I ask, taking another drink from the awful goddamn coffee. Diran just nods and says it. The coffee doesn't stay in my mouth for very long.

"We want you to destroy Trabia Garden."

* * *

"So it really was Lyle Diran behind it?"

"Don't look so smug, it wasn't exactly a difficult puzzle."

"Apologies. It sounds like a convincing pitch though. Kiros and Xu would be proud."

"Yeah, I thought so. Using our comm unit as their evidence was a nice touch."

"I wonder what they used before they found it?"

"Probably they just slammed some circuitry down on the table and called it a camera or something. Not like anyone besides us has ever really seen Esthar tech up close."

"Can he pull it off?" she asks me.

I nod. "Maybe. There were thirty-plus people there easily, so I guess the speech worked a good few times before we came along. With that and what he has from the crashes he can probably pull it off."

They'd kept everything from the crashes. Hull-plating, packing containers, whatever they had ripped from the cockpit and engines. And the engines of course. The power-cores and wiring and all the other crap. He'd shown us them sitting there, just humming away in one of the warehouses under the mountains, ones they had dug out years ago. The whole lot of us had stared at the faintly-glowing wire-wrapped engines and just nodded. I'd stood there trying to keep my smile in place and wondering how goddamn catastrophic the things could be, in the hands of amateurs like Kurlen and his cronies.

"Did he talk about…" Quistis starts, and trails off.

I shake my head, I know what she means. Still can't really say it though, can she. "No, nothing about any SeeDs they have working on the inside. Implications, no details," I say. "But he did show us the GF."

She leans forward, eager. "You saw it?" she asks.

I think back a few hours, before they drove us out and back into the town. It had been a big room, with a slope that looked like it led directly up into the mountains. When the bunch of us had gotten there there'd only been a single man waiting for us. "I met the host," I say.

"Did he…"

He had looked half-dead on his feet, like he had the flu and a cold and food poisoning all at once. But he had thrown fire and melted steel and half a dozen other tricks that had had the others whooping and hollering and treating him like a rock-star as Diran looked on serenely. "Yeah, he was legit," I tell her.

"We need to think about this," Quistis says, tapping her foot. "We can't count on Kiros and Esthar for help anymore, now they have our stuff."

I shrug. "We'll have to think of something on our own then," I say. "We can't beat up an entire town on our own." Suddenly I feel tired. Two nights of nervous action and today hours and hours of being introduced to the little murderous conspiracy and I'm dead on my feet. "Whatever we plan we can we do it tomorrow." I say. Something's needling at the back of my mind but I can't figure out what. "The guys down there still have some work to do before they can attack, or infiltrate, or whatever. A couple of days is plenty of time for us to think something up." That was how close it had been, apparently. A couple of days later and we'd have arrived too late to do shit. Now there's a thought to make you shiver.

Quistis just sits there and nods, staring at the fire, deep in thought. I turn around and I'm about to head out when I hear her voice behind her, and figure out what's been bothering me all night.

"Seifer?" Her voice sounds soft around my name.

"What?"

"About today."

I turn and look back at her but she's still staring at the window. She's sat there in the deep upholstered chair, limbs curled up around herself like a cat in front of the fire, that long hair scattered over her, rising and falling with her breath. Even in the cheap and rough clothes we've bought from the local stores, she looks good. "What?" I ask.

"I can't…" she says, and something in her voice breaks as she does. The air catches in her throat and for a half-second she makes a noise that isn't a word. It sounds like pain, or hurt.

"That's okay," I say, and mean it. In that moment I feel bad for bringing it up. I've grabbed hold of some blade piercing her heart and now I'm trying to rip it out.

"But thank you," she says, and smile just a little bit. She twists on the chair to look at me and the fabric of her clothes moves and tightens around her as she shifts in the seat. For a half-second I can see her outlined perfectly, breasts pulling the cheap cotton shirt taut over her chest as it rises and falls with her breath, hips and legs outlined in cheap denim as it twists about her. Laid out in front of me suddenly she looks incredibly sensual and she doesn't even know it. "For caring," she finishes, and looks at me with blue eyes, the bluest I've seen in days.

I turn away before she can see any of me react. "Goodnight Quistis."

I hear the voice but I don't dare look back. "Goodnight Seifer."

I go to bed, and dream of fire rising over the Trabia horizon.


	12. Memory and Change

Apologies for the long break, real life is demanding more attention this year. I'll try and get back into a more regular - and often - schedule, but no promises. :(

We'll ease back in with something a little more...thoughtful. Hope you enjoy.

~Cobray

* * *

"_This doesn't look like what we were told." I put the binoculars down and turned to the pilot. I have to shout to be heard over the roaring surf. "Well?"_

"_There's been a build-up in the last few hours," he replied, keeping an eye on the horizon. I know from experience at the first sign of incoming fire he's going to start turning that wheel with everything he's got, and I keep my hands on the railing. "They've been moving troops from further in-land, from one of the bases."_

"_How many?"_

"_A company."_

_I know the look I must have given him. We had expected a platoon, planned for it. We had expected infantry from the neighbouring town already half-exhausted from their march. Tired soldiers who might put up a token resistance before surrendering. This wasn't that. I felt my chest contract, like someone had just punched me in the gut._

"_Mechanised."_

_The punch turned into a sledgehammer as images of Galbadian mobile armour run through my head. _Turn the boat around,_ I want to say, but I can't. Even if we're facing three hundred instead of fifty I know I can't. I've seen the reports and the little intelligence we've managed to squeeze and scrape from inside the Galbadian government. If we let this go now it will only get worse at the next town, if they think we won't intervene. More than that, it will get a _lot_ worse for the civilians already living right here, ones with the pure bad luck to live somewhere with a military-grade port. Galbadia hasn't had a navy since we smashed G-Garden half a decade ago. We go to war over the stupidest things._

_I turn away from the capital and shove myself back down to the hatch to the troop-deck, and the first thing I see are the faces of the students there. Two years ago they had just been ten more identical faces in a crowd of freshmen. Now I know every one of them at least as well as I know myself. Better maybe, because the kids before me – barely younger then I had been when I became a SeeD – are still young enough to wear their heart on their sleeve. Still at the stage where they believe that they can make a lasting difference, just because they want to. I feel guilty knowing that part of this outlook comes from me, even though I barely still believe it myself._

"_We'll be coming under heavier fire than we had expected," I say calmly, and resist the urge to scowl. I've done it at them plenty over the last year of their training, they don't need it now, not so close to their first combat. I look to my left, at Sybil and her team. "Squad one still goes into the town." Then right, to Raden and his. "You're going to take your squad to the port and secure it."_

"_Instructor!"_

_I raise a hand to stave off the boy's objection. "Not today cadet. Today you follow your orders. Your grade depends on it." As if they don't already know exactly what they'll be graded on, not spent hours examining every inch of the rules for loopholes and escape clauses. B-Garden stopped hiding examination criteria after the first war ended, after one especially notable failure._

_I lurch upwards as the boat hits a wave, and then there's only one warning; a dull_

CRUMP

_that seems to resound through the hull like a cannonball dropped onto gravel, and then I throw myself into one of the seats as our transport starts to lurch wildly in what feels like every direction at once, including down._

"_Oh god."_

_I don't know which one of them said it – maybe Sara, she was never any good with boats – but I can understand their feeling. The loud noises start to come more and faster now, as the artillery the Galbadians have outside the town find their ranges and start to bombard us as we race to hit the beach before they can get to the port and keep us out. Raden is comforting one of the other students, always the older brother, always calm. I feel an urge to tap my foot and it takes serious effort to keep it still, and project an image of absolute calm towards my students. I always hated this part, locked inside a steel hull, relying totally on someone else to not screw up and kill us._

_The next impact feels close enough to rattles the bones in my body. The shells aren't stopping as we approach, in fact there are more of them now, a metronome of flying screaming metal, one a second into the water around us, trying for the one lucky shot._

"_Instructor, are we-"_

"_We'll be fine," I say. "Concentrate on what you're going to do when we hit sand. Remember your list." The old mantras they drilled into my head and that I drilled into these kids. Observe Twice Move Once, Stillness under Fire, Calm Under Pressure._

_One Shot One Kill._

_All of it is driven from my mind as suddenly the ship slams itself upwards and we all grab on to stop tumbling into the back of the steel plating. The bulkhead in front of me peels back to reveal shining blue sky and white clouds that shift upward to show blinding sands as the transport's momentum hitting the sand throws the prow into the air, where it hangs for a second before smashing back down and opening the front door. The noise coming from outside changes from the one-second metronome of passing shells into the crazy chatter of machine-guns. They beat us to the beach. Damn. I take a deep breath: "EVERYBODY OUT!"_

_Raden doesn't hesitate. "SQUAD TWO!" He's out almost before he's finished bellowing, and the other students with him. Sybil is out a half-second later, and then I step out last._

_I'm there again, just like I was back then. Before it was three young men, too cocksure for their own good and too talented for the enemy's. Now there are ten of them, but the looks on their faces are roughly similar to the ones Squall, Zell and Seifer wore all those years ago._

"_Your job is to secure the port and prevent the enemy forces from pushing past us into the town! Your job as a SeeD is to help anyone under attack who asks for our help. Galbadia has attacked and Dollet has asked, so get out there and do it!"_

_I stared down at them and watched their reactions. Several of them looked scared as hell. Good, they would be the ones who did their job and wouldn't try to emulate a certain other group of trainees I could remember. Sibyl looked confident. Raden was staring up at me with something between anticipation and that old look I had learned to see since the War. He wasn't seeing his instructor and superior, he was seeing Quistis Trepe, and behind her he was seeing Squall Leonhart and the rest of the Orphanage Gang, who had all started their journey the same way he was. I'd seen the look before, and it was always dangerous._

"_Just go do your jobs," I commanded, and swept my hand at them. Like it was a gale and not just a wave, they scattered, running off towards the port with their heads low as in the too-close distance the chatter and bark of rifles and pistols was overridden by the boom of tanks. I sighed, ignoring the machine-gun fire that was far too far away to be any danger, and looked back at the captain._

"_Not bad."_

_But I ignored him. I was thinking about my team, and the badly-disguised look of gleeful impatience that had been on my best student's face. The same student that had just run off towards battle. "Get me Xu." It feels like hands are crawling at my brain, and I know whatever Xu tells me I'll end up going in there, somehow._

* * *

The same dreams, every time.

I opened my eyes and stares sideways at the wall of the bedroom as outside the badly-insulated house the wind whispered and breathed in through the gaps. I considered ignoring it all, just closing my eyes and trying to salvage what little peace I could from the nigh. It was too late though, and I knew it. One dream followed the other like clockwork, and I didn't want to sink back down knowing that hell was waiting for me down there.

I shrugged the covers off and the sudden switch from the cosy heat of the old woollen blankets to the half-frigid tepidness of the rest of the small house makes me gasp and shiver. I dressed quickly, trying to keep the amount of skin I had to expose to the cold to a minimum. The sun had been down for hours, taking with it the only warmth Havensden saw, and now all that was left outside the small window in the bedroom was darkness, a black featureless curtain that flowed over the town, smothering it.

Something tingled at the back of my neck and it took me a moment to realise it wasn't an itch, it was just the quiet around me. I don't have to think hard to know why; if my sleep was shallow and tortured then Seifer's was non-existent, and the thing I was missing was _him, _pacing around the tiny shack in the night, the floorboards squeaking under him . Sometimes I would wake up at night in a half-daze long enough to hear the creak of footsteps in the other room, or see light creeping from under the door and a shadow crossing it rhythmically, back and forth like a metronome. I wondered if he felt trapped here, a tiger in a too-small cage pacing away the days to try and stave the madness off. Maybe he was like me, avoiding sleep because he didn't want to see what was waiting to pounce on him there.

_More likely he's worried about someone on _this_ side of sleep pouncing on him, Quistis._

Half a decade and change spent wandering and hunted. I tried to imagine the transition; from general and leader and Knight to just one more sword trying to make a living on pocket-change across the world, with that name and face and history hanging over him. There were a half-dozen attempts at capture I knew about, random fragments of information that had passed me by back at Balamb Garden, and at least a handful more at something more permanent. Revenge-fuelled things by people at least as desperate or lost as him. Crossing the globe with nothing but a blade for company and a history trailing behind him, ready to catch up and strangle him if he stopped moving for too long.

Well, loneliness was certainly something I could appreciate. At Garden there had always been a wall there. The first wall had been made between Instructor Trepe and her students, barely younger than she was. For a few months at the start I had tried what every educator in history tries; to be friends, to try and help them, to offer more than just a talking head in front of a blackboard. But there had been whispered words among the other staff, and eventually the words had turned into rumours that could have threatened to break my wings before I even took off. It had stopped there and the wall had gone up and around my students I never took it down.

Then the war had come and went and the wall had been replaced with a pedestal so high the six of us had had trouble seeing the ground. The gap between students and teacher looked miniscule, barely there, compared to the gap between heroes and mere mortals, and suddenly there was nobody we could talk to about it except each other, because there was no-one else who could ever know what it had been like. We had each other and the few others who had been part of the journey; Cid and Edea, Xu and Nida, a few others who had kept pace like Zone and Watts as their paths occasionally intersecting with ours as the war went from SeeD mission to political manhunt to international war, and then had somehow escalated into a fight to keep humanity alive against an impossible force. They were people we could wave to and make passing conversation with if we met at the same functions or meetings. But when we tried to talk about the things we saw near the end of the war all they could offer was confused sympathy, because how could you do it? How could you make them understand?

We had all had our moments of…imbalance. We'd be living our lives and doing our jobs and then see something or someone that tripped off memories and suddenly we'd be back there. If we were together we would see the signs and there would be a reassuring hand on a shoulder or a quiet word in their ear. One of us would be speaking and suddenly they'd stop, or their voice would hitch up, or some other small sign and we'd catch them before they fell.

But sometimes we'd be alone, and we had no choice but to get past it, _alone_. A year or so after the war I'd been in Galbadia for a small gathering at an Estharian diplomatic embassy. Some low-key party where the most exciting event of the evening was someone making a cutting remark about the new President's clothing. I'd been looking around the old Galbadian mansion with the rest of the SeeD envoys, admiring the ancient woodwork and paintings. Suddenly I had started to shiver uncontrollably and I hadn't known why. Shivering so badly I hadn't been able to hold onto my drink. I'd made excuses through chattering teeth and found the nearest dark empty room to sit in until hours Xu found me alone, sitting with my arms wrapped over my head like someone in a bomb shelter. I'd explained it as clearly as I could; the huge oil-paintings surrounded by the ornate wooden frames had been like the ones in another library, one where the sound of rustling paper wasn't from wind flowing across the books but from the whispers of their insane master tearing through them, and the haze in the air was the thick substance of time caught and held and twisted all out of shape. I had tried to explain half of this to Xu in halting words and half-formed sentences, and had given up when I looked at her and saw only confusion and sympathy on her face. We'd laughed and hugged and celebrated on our SeeD graduations, and cried together and swore vengeance burying the dead after the battle between Balamb and Galbadia Gardens. But now I'd been somewhere and experienced something she could never know and there was a wall of incomprehension between us I could never break down.

And then there was one more person on that short list. Someone who had been with us almost every step of the journey. He just hadn't been _with_ us.

_He'd laugh if he knew you were thinking like this. He always hated pity, remember._

The old Seifer, maybe.

_You think the one in front of you is 'new' somehow?_

I tell myself that but the little voice somehow isn't as convincing as it used to be. Sat in the dark I think back and all the memories I have of Seifer are the same: I remembered a smug grin in G-Garden's throne-room, strutting and insulting us as behind him Ultimecia in our adoptive mother's body sat and watched. He had been like that back in Esthar too when Kiros had hauled him up from prison and put him in front of me and maneuverer us both into coming out here. Even though he could have been thrown back down into the depths of Esthar he had still had that cocky smirk, that bullet-proof scorn for everything around him. He was quieter here, less angry at everything. Like the aura of fire he carried around with him had been forced inside his body by the relentless cold and held back. Still there, but an intense calm rather than a raging scorn for everything.

Maybe it was the Trabian ice for him, the same way it had been the Estharian sun for me. It had blasted away the crusted armour is disappointment and resignation and for the first time in years I'd been able to breathe. At Garden it had felt like I'd been just standing around trying to hold up dyke while around me everyone else was knocking holes in it. We would patch up the latest border skirmish or raiding strike and then something else would come up, and we'd rush over to plug that hole, endlessly running, unable to stop and make better plans and think of a more permanent solution. Compared to that endless slog Esthar had been heaven. Real work, re-building a country, having people _look forward_ to us arriving, had been bliss in comparison, the thing we'd all hoped SeeD would be. Not the political stopgap we had turned into after the war.

_You have to take the long view,_ Xu had told me, and even though I knew she was right I hated it. I despised them all, the smiling politics and the manoeuvring and the backstabbing. Years after the war I had looked around at the company I found myself in and remembering the emergency mission to recover Seifer on his childish assassination mission, the thing that had finally led him away from Garden, chasing his dream of being a real Sorceress Knight.

I'd looked around and wondered if maybe he hadn't had the right idea after all.

_And now he's out there alone with this crazy fanatic and his insane plan._

Bombing T-Garden. It was insane. It was pointless. It couldn't possibly work. More than once the Gardens had been threatened. Renegade units of the Galbadian Regular Army had tried to invade Balamb while it was docked near the coast and been repelled with barely a scratch. Others we had no names or nationalities for had tried smarter plans and dumber plans and all of them had folded, one way or another. When Seifer had first told me for a second I had thought the exact same thing. Then I had remembered why we were here, and what we were after, and I had gotten worried. Really worried. I could try and go back to sleep but I knew all I would dream of were cloaked figures riding towards Trabia in the darkness, carrying on their backs the technology they had stolen from Esthar, and the magic they had stolen from Balamb. And finally somewhere back there in the darkness and snow the final piece of the puzzle, the black SeeD feeding them information and funds that had led to the deaths of dozens of Esthar civilians, and the four loyal members of _my_ outfit that had been guarding the GF when they had shot it from the sky.

Whoever they were, I hated them.

I felt more than angry, I felt _furious._ How fucking _dare_ these people think they could do something like this! To think they could take on an organisation that had taken down Sorceresses and kept an entire planet on an even keel. The idea was insulting, it was maddening, it was…it was…

God, was that how Seifer had used to think?

There was no way I was getting back to sleep now. I could feel my hands clenching and un-clenching as I looked out of the window into the darkness beyond. I needed to _do_ something. I knew Seifer was out there in the dark somewhere doing actual work, and somehow it just felt…wrong, to be sitting here watching the windows.

I opened the door and the small warmth in the house was sucked away into the night. I held by hand out in front of me and it disappeared into the darkness and cold, like I had plunged it into a pool of icy water. I shivered and shoved it back into the pockets of my jacket as quickly as I could, and walked. I was almost as familiar with the town now as I was with Balamb Garden, from long walks and courier duty and any other excuse I had found to explore the place with an excuse. This late at night I had the streets all to myself, the few patrols that still guarded against the Esthar visitors standing out against the night like raging stars, easily avoided.

* * *

The sheer concrete walls of the admin building rose up out of the snow and darkness like an iceberg in front of a ship, and I stopped outside for a moment, just staring up at the edifice before me. Like everything else in Havensden it followed the same template. It was built for survival and nothing else.

_Like you._

"Imalia?"

I turned to see two shadows detach themselves from a doorframe. The night shift, Kira and another man who I've seen around but have barely spoken with. His name's on the tip of my tongue. They're just leaving, looks like my timing was right. "Kira, hello. I'm sorry about barging in like this as you're about to go-"

"No no, it's no problem!" the woman said quickly.

"Working late?" I remembered now; Alain. He's been here longer than me but he's a little younger. One of the bright-eyed young things who came up from the mainland chasing one of the strange dreams that Havensden represents. Whether he's found it here I don't know.

I smiled cloyingly. "Left my bag before I left." I look again at Kira. "Mind if I take a look? I'll lock up when I leave."

She smiled and handed me the keys without a thought. "Sure. Good night Imalia." Alain just nodded, and the two of them left, swallowed into the darkness outside without another word, leaving me alone in the grey concrete building.

_To work._

I pushed past the thick wooden doors to the darkness beyond. No lobby here, or smiling receptionist, or anything else designed for human comfort. I'd been given the tour by Kira, smiling nervously the whole time like she was expecting me to snap at her at any moment – maybe with some justification, if she worked alongside that brute Kurlen – and everything in it was devoted to work. Even the chairs for the record-keepers like me were simple wooden planks, hammered together by one of the carpenters who had moved to the city from Galbadia.

_Here somewhere…_I ran my hands across the dusty shelves, reams and reams of paper, as far from Esthar's shining technology as it was possible to go. I'd spent days here moving, sorting, collating, playing the quiet little helper along with Kira and the other Havensden citizens that were either too old or weak to work out in the fields or construction crews at the outer edges of the city. I'd seen the looks and heard the whispers and ignored all of them, just soaking up information and waiting for a shot. This seemed as good a time as any.

I smiled as the keys dropped into my hands with a dull brass _clink._ The advantage to people thinking you were a nobody was that they stopped thinking around you. Diran had seen me in this room a dozen times and hadn't even wondered why I was so intent on cleaning the dust from the old shelves.

_Let's see what you're hiding, councilman._

* * *

He was hiding nothing.

"Shit!" I wanted to toss the papers away in frustration but settled for putting them back into their drawers. An hour and nothing. Compared to my own office back at Balamb, Councilman Lyle Diran's was tiny. I searched and searched but there was just nothing.

_You don't even know what you expected to find! You just came out here because you thought you had to! Because you were guilty._

I locked the door behind me as quietly as I could, cursing. At myself, at the smug Havensden leader, at everything about this entire situation. What else was there to do?

_You could do something._

I _am_ doing something.

_No, _Seifer_ is doing something. What _you're _doing is useless make-work. Did you seriously think the man would keep a drawer with papers marked TOP-SECRET INVASION PLANS SEEDS STAY OUT?_

My hands drifted over the shelves. Endless paper, the contents of an entire town at the tip of my hands. I took a breath, and then…

_So what would Seifer do?_

He'd go find something and break it.

_No, stop that. Teenage Seifer was a reckless dreamer who didn't listen to anyone and let his heart rule his body. Teenage Quistis was a standoffish brat who jumped to conclusions and didn't have half the maturity she thought she did. Neither of you are those people anymore. Now try again._

I stood in the darkness for a moment, and closed my eyes. I could see him standing in front of me, white coat, gunblade case and cocky grin, all of eighteen years old. I felt irritated just looking at it. The place might change – the TV studio in Timber, the parade at Deling, the throne-rook at G-Garden, too many more to count – but the man

_No, the boy._

remained the same. I saw everything so clearly then. Everything I did and thought about Seifer was around this image, this boy.

One more deep breath, and the image was gone.

Another, and it was replaced. The man, not the boy. I had always had a good memory, I could see him clearly. Instead of smiling at me from the other side of a blade, surrounded by fire and blood, the new – the _real_ – Seifer was just stood there, in the house we kept in Havensden. He was older, the extreme youth erased by five years of hard living and running. The grin was gone, replaced by something much more subdued, but much, much more intense. I shivered.

_Now try again: What. Would. Seifer. Do?_

Ah, of course.

He would find some weak spot, some small crack in the enemy. Then he would wedge himself there, and pry it open as hard as he could.

I smiled. It was too perfect. Seifer had told me everything I needed to know before he was dragged off to Trabia with his ludicrous squad of supercharged 'freedom fighters'. I could find the place they'd left easily enough. From Havensden to T-Garden was several hundred miles away. I had time.

I would go and see what I could pry up.


	13. Darkness and Fire

It isn't you.

It isn't you.

It isn't you.

Half of them shuffling their feet nervously, trying to find things to stare at, and trying to look like they knew what they were doing. Trying to look like they were trained soldiers and not what they were; farmers and blacksmiths given guns and told to march in the direction of the enemy.

"Get off."

And then the other half, except none of them looks like they qualify either. If they had been soldiers they had been the kind I'd seen hundreds of; trained thugs, the bottom of the barrel. People who had been kicked out of the regular army for fucking up again and again, or fucking up once big-time. They'd signed up because they wanted a gun and a uniform and they'd left because they hadn't been able to use the former, or abuse the latter.

I jump from the sled and sigh, breath streaming out of my mouth in the frozen air. The scenery is two colours; white snow and grey stone. Even as I watch the grey's already vanishing under the white as the blizzard around us grows, and everything steadily growing darker as the mountains sun through the falling sun. Good weather and timing for an assault. _That,_ at least, is something a SeeD would have made sure of.

Even if they aren't here with us I can tell there's a professional behind this somehow. Kurlen might be leading this ludicrous attack but he isn't the one who designed it. It stinks of deviousness, and that's something the big man doesn't have much room for. It's the little touches. Acidic compounds instead of explosives. Smaller three-man teams instead of regular five-man squads. Silenced weapons. Knives.

"Something you'd like to say, Almasy?"

I look at Kurlen and see the brute glaring at me as he jumps down from the sled that got us here in hours instead of days. Esthar-tech, built from the ruins of the ships they shot down. "Nothing at all," I reply.

"Good." He turns to the others, standing around idly, not trying to hunker down from the wind or prying eyes. Amateurs, one and all. They stumble over as he calls to them and lays out a map sealed in plastic. A map of Trabia Garden. Another SeeD touch. "Here's the plan…"

I half-listen. It's obvious from the scribbles and notes on the map that it isn't even his plan. The nameless SeeD has lain down arrows and marks and paths on the map like directions to the local grocery store for a particularly dumb child. I'm not even looking at Kurlen as he tries to talk like a general. I'm looking at the man behind him, the one who's been flanked by two other of the soldier-types since we left Havensden.

I saw him in the loading bay as we left, bundled onto the sled last, and every step of the way since he's looked like he was about to drop dead. His eyes are red and puffy, cheeks swollen like somebody trying not to throw up or somebody with a fever. Even now just standing in the snow he looks like he's a half-second away from keeling over and dropping dead. Poor bastard, he's got something much worse than any fever, he has a GF in his head. They're tricky bastards to keep happy even when they like you; Ifrit has to be bouncing around the inside of his head smashing up the furniture.

Kurlen's looking at him now and gesturing him over. The man lurches up to the map along with his escort and we all look down at the image. I've never been inside a Garden since…well…for a long time. I've seen G-Garden's belly though, and this one doesn't look too different. Sketches of the upper-levels. Personnel. Dormitories. They're going to destroy T-Garden by removing the people in it. Fuckers.

"Almasy."

"What?" I ask the big man.

"Your team is here," Kurlen says, stabbing the map with a gloved finger. It's a whole level underneath where the GF host is going to be, shit. "You make sure nobody sneaks up while we're working."

While you rampage through the place? No. "You want me with you."

"I _want_ you doing what I _tell_ you to do, which is watching our backs while we do our work," he sneers at me.

"If you're interrupted by Trabian SeeDs you'll want me with you," I try again, far too aware I'm surrounded by Kurlen's cronies. Fuck it, they hate me anyway. "Unless you think this little farmer's market can win against trained soldiers." I glare at them. _Try me._

"You're not in charge of this expedition, you'll do what I say or you can fucking well walk home."

I can feel my nails digging into my palm and it takes actual effort to release them. Fine, it doesn't matter. He stares at me and I stare back. I wonder if putting me far away from him and the GF-host was his idea or the SeeD behind this mission. Whoever they are I doubt they trust me either. This is my test, a pass or fail grade.

Of course, I already plan to flunk.

* * *

I remember my history well enough, from endless boring lectures in the junior classes before we graduated to the combat curriculum. An old people that built shelters designed to guard them against some unknowable war, mobile bunkers that could house entire communities in safety for decades. None of them were ever used, the Centran people that build them devoured and annihilated by an ancient Lunar Cry. The shelters sat there for millennia, unused, until they were found and re-purposed by one couple far-sighted enough to know that there would eventually be a use for gigantic flying structures big enough to be a town. Or a school.

Of course it's been a long time since they were built. We've learned a few tricks since then.

The air around us hisses and I can taste the ammonia on my nostrils as the mixture eats away at the frame in front of us, Esthar chemicals that might have been fuel or spaceship brake fluid eating away at the ceramics of the door until it falls outward, goons catching it gently and hoisting it away silently. There's no lights on the other side, only a corridor that recedes into darkness.

"Let's go."

A dozen men stream in through the breach and I catch a final glance of the man hosting Ifrit, looking no better away from the snow's glare than he did in it, and then he's whisked away by his minders.

I'm about to do the same when Kurlen turns to me, still a half-dozen or so men around us. Shit, is he going to burn me down right here? My hand's already reaching for my pistol when he speaks-

"Don't fuck this up Almasy."

"Or you'll what? Shoot me? So much for the element of surprise, jackass." I can't believe he's sitting in the middle of enemy territory bitching. If nothing else, this much convinces me there's a trained SeeD behind this whole thing. If somebody had tried this back at Balamb, Trepe would have jumped on them for it.

_Hey, it worked for you back in Dollet._

"Don't tempt me. Lyle trusts you enough to bring you in on this, but don't think for a goddamn second that I do. Fuck this up and you won't even be _coming_ home."

I raise my arms and clap, and see the man behind Kurlen flinch at the noise. God, even his men are smarter than he is. "Nice speech, well said. Very intimidating."

"You think-"

"You think _you_ have reasons for hating SeeD?" I whisper at him. "You think whatever little grudge you have is worse than behind hounded across the entire fucking world?" I get right up in his face. "Try having a _bounty on your head_, asshole. Then you talk to me about grudges." I can feel real anger there in my voice, didn't even realise I had it.

He hears it as well, backs down. "Just don't screw up." He turns and pads off into the darkness.

I turn to the other two people in my 'team'. At least I got two of the farmer-boy wannabes, they shouldn't be too hard to give the slip once we get deeper in. Take them down as quietly as possible then find either someone with enough sense to not immediately open fire on Seifer Almasy the legendary traitor, or something that will get me in contact with Esthar and Seagill.

It nags at me though. Not Kurlen, or what Kurlen said to me. What I said back. And something else.

_Remember Dollet?_

I did. It was there in my mind, perfectly preserved like a fly in amber. For as long as I could remember it would intrude into my thoughts and dreams, didn't matter whether I was sleeping in the headmaster's suite in G-Garden, inside the Lunatic Pandora waiting for Leonhart and his crew to arrive, or, afterwards, sitting in a hotel on whatever dumb job was paying for the leaky roof over my head.

Even how I thought about it changed with where I was. I used to think it had been a shining moment, taking charge during Squall's disastrous leadership and grasping victory when he was too scared to reach for it. Then afterwards during the war as Edea's Knight I used to think about it as the first stepping-stone that had brought me to my dream, and beyond.

Now I looked back at that moment and cringed. Now the final scene in that little memory wasn't the charge to the Dollet radio tower, or the chase from the town, slicing through Galbadian back to the boats. Now the final scene was the look the others had back at Garden, when the gunfire had died down and the results were coming in. Now it was Xu looking at me with disgust and Kramer looking at me with pity. And Trepe, looking at me with disappointment.

_They didn't understand._

No.

_Once you'd have jumped at the chance to get even with Garden like this._

I'm not that person anymore.

"Almasy?"

I look around at the other two and when I look closely I can see it in their eyes. Farmers who've been filled with so much crap it's driven the sense from their skulls. They came to Havensden searching for something, and Lyle Diran and whatever's driving him has twisted that to his own ends.

_Like you were twisted._

But that isn't right either, not entirely. I had wanted it. Maybe Ede- maybe Ultimecia had shown me the gate but I still walked through it myself.

_They drove you to it. They left you no other option._

No. There had been other options, I just hadn't taken any of them. I'd walked down that road from Dollet to G-Garden to Adel and smiled every step of the way. Because I wanted to be right and Squall to be wrong.

No, I wanted Squall _to know_ he had been wrong.

God, who had that brat been?

"Almasy?"

"_What?"_

"How long are we going to stay here?"

The corridors were still dark. The personnel quarters were on the other side of the Garden complex, more than enough time to wake up a custodial staffer and warn them.

_You could follow him. The road's still there._

I could do it. Do what Kurlen said, what Diran and the invisible SeeD at his side wanted. No way massacring Trabia was anything but a stepping-stone to something else. I could let it happen, prove my loyalty. Walk down that road again to whatever end they had, Diran in charge of the world or whatever that slimy asshole wanted.

_Get back at them once and for all, all of them. Squall and Kiros and Irvine and Trepe and all the others who looked at you like so much trash. They deserve it._

No, they didn't.

"Almasy?"

There it was. They didn't deserve it.

_But if they don't deserve it now, did they deserve it back then?_

I wipe a hand across my face to try and remove the buzzing I can suddenly feel inside my head.

_Did they?_

No.

"_Almasy!"_

I turn to the man. "Sorry."

"Wha-"

He doesn't finish the word. Bladed fist catches him in the throat before he can even shut his mouth. For a half-second his eyes go wide in shock and then he's on the ground, clawing at his jugular. I twist past him as the other 'soldier' turns at the noise and catches sight of his downed friend but it doesn't do him any good and I'm on him. My pistol's out-

_Shoot him._

-and I club him as hard as I can in the stomach with the butt, and then another on the top of his head as he falls. I hear a cough and kick once and they're both down. Five seconds.

_Not bad old man._

I'm not that old. Garden usually keeps a half-dozen custodial staff awake at night for communications duty, if I can get over there I should be able to-

"_FREEZE!"_

The voice slices through me and I have no choice but to listen. If it's Kurlen come back to check once more on me I'm dead, dead, dead. If…no, it isn't.

He's little more than a boy, sixteen, maybe eighteen at the most. But just looking at him from a distance I can see how much better he is than the rag-tag assholes I came here with. The rifle doesn't waver as he points it at me, and I can see the look in his eyes.

I put my hands up and turn to him, slowly. Very slowly. "Wait a second." I hear _click_ noises from behind me and suddenly I know this isn't one random guard at the wrong place at the wrong time. I crane my neck and catch them at the corner of my eye. Two more behind me, both already aiming. I drop the pistol in my hand and it lands on the floor with a _crack_ noise. Not a one of them flinch.

"Get down on the ground!" the voice is young but strong, unafraid.

_This isn't some random sweep. They're not surprised._

Above us, the lights flicker on, turning the walls from shadowed black to a blazing white. I squint as my eyes adjust.

_They're not surprised at all._

"Seifer?"

I don't dare turn around, but I don't need to. I recognise the voice. "Tilmitt." If Irvine passed through here then he probably told her everything. I turn. "It's nice to see you to, but-"

"You stay exactly like that."

That didn't sound right. "What?" When she speaks again I push my own emotions away and listen to her, really _listen_ to her.

"They told me, but I didn't really believe it."

My blood runs cold as she speaks. She sounds furious. Angrier than I've ever heard her, even during the times we fought during the war. Of all of them Selphie had been the conciliatory one, the one who had always tried to find some common ground to get us back on the same side, or at least to put our weapons down. Now I can't hear any of that. Told her _what?_ "I don't know what you've heard but-"

"Take his weapons."

The boy kicks the pistol away from me, glaring as he does so. If Selphie wasn't here I swear he'd be clubbing me with his rifle. What have they _heard? _"Tilmitt stop for a second. This isn't what you think. Hasn't Kinneas told you _anything?_"

I know I've made a mistake as suddenly my back explodes in pain, like somebody just jammed burning coals into it, and I fall onto my knees. I know I'm almost right when I hear a _whirr_ noise repeating endlessly behind me. Tilmitt's thrown her solid-steel nunchucks at me. "Wait-" I gasp.

"Don't you talk about him! Not after what you did!"

The bottom drops out of my stomach and I knew something is wrong. "Where's Irvine?" I say, staying down. I know if I try and get up I'm going to get another steel rod in my spine.

"Alive. Recovering."

That isn't the kind of thing you say about someone who's okay. I remember the last time I saw him, run out of Havensden on a rail after those little games in the snow to get Diran and the others to start trusting me. Long enough time for something to go wrong. Did Kurlen ambush him on the way back to Trabia? Did the mystery SeeD arrange an accident? Did…

No, ignore it, it isn't something you can change so it isn't important. Remember Trepe's lessons. What mattered? Trabia and Selphie. Selphie adored Trabia, would never let anything bad happen to it. Would bleed out for it if she had to. "There are more attackers here," I say quickly, and stand. She lets me.

"Where?"

"Heading to the dormitories," I say, and brace myself. Either she's distracted by my words or too angry to hit me again. "They have Ifrit stolen from Garden, they're going to let him out and destroy as much as they can." I risk turning around. Selphie Tilmitt stands behind me, eyes wide. She isn't in her usual yellow ensemble, she's dressed in long pants and sleeves, a Garden uniform.

_She was expecting trouble._

She turns to one of the other SeeDs. "Tell the others, send squads." Back to me. "Which one has Ifrit?"

I think quickly. "I don't know his name. Brown clothes, flak jacket. He looks like he's half-dead."

The boy scuttles off, talking into the small radio on his uniform. Selphie turns back to me. "If you're lying to me…"

I sit back down on the ground, keeping my hands where the twitchy kids can see them, trying to think through the last ten minutes before I do something to make it – or me – worse.

"I'm telling the truth," I say. She responds, and really her words just sum up everything about Seifer Almasy.

"I don't believe you."

* * *

"How did you know we were coming?"

Tilmitt's pacing up and down the corridor, not looking at me. "We were warned about saboteurs, and you leading them."

"By who?"

"You think I'd tell you?"

"You've been lied to."

"Yet here you are." A faint hissing from her small communicator. "Yes?" Tilmitt stares at me as she puts it up to her ear. For a second there's only the crackling of voices through static, and when it ends her expression changes, to something not good. "They have three people locked down. Not a dozen. Three"

What. "What?"

She smacks one of her nunchucks into her palm. "There's no army here, it's just you and your flunkies. Again."

That's impossible. I watched them walk off into the rest of Garden. "There's a dozen more people in here Tilmitt, I swear."

"I think it's just you. I don't believe I listened, after everything." She gestures to her subordinate. "Get him up, we're taking him to the infirmary 'till we know what to do with him."

Something's wrong. Think, Seifer. They have to still be here. I saw the host, I saw the equipment and weapons they brought in. If…

Oh no. "Til- Selphie."

"I'm not listening to you anymore, Seifer."

Even as I speak I know it's hopeless. She has zero reason to believe me and every reason she should. "They're in here but they're not at the dormitories. They're going to use Ifrit to destroy-"

She whirls on me and I can see in her eyes it's useless. She points an angry finger at me and I decide. Now or never.

"Listen you-"

I step back to avoid her finger and trip up. I sprawl backwards, almost falling on the guard behind me. He takes a step forward, weapon still pointed, but now to see what happened rather than aimed directly at me. It's enough.

"Don't get close, he's-"

They're SeeDs but still green. I twist as I fall and push off with my feet, throwing both fists into the boy behind me. He folds up instantly, rag-dolling as all the breath in his body is driven out at once. The rifle falls from his hands and I grab it by the middle. I turn and see the other SeeD aiming-

_No time to think._

-and throw mine at her. It throws off her aim long enough for me to step forward and get a hand up. Pain explodes across my hand as Selphie's steel nunchucks hit, slamming into my raised palm instead of my forehead. She jerks it back as I get close enough to the other shocked SeeD trainee to do the same to her, and then it's me and Selphie. "Sorry about this."

"Liar."

I'm not lying but I don't have the time to explain, and she won't listen anyway. I do the thing she least expects. I turn and run. I catch one last glimpse of her looking shocked, knowing she can't run after me as two of her students lie gasping for air on the ground. She glares daggers and then turns away as I turn a corner, and then I'm alone, running for my life through the depths of Trabia-Garden.

And the lives of everyone inside it.

* * *

I take the stairs five at a time, my bones shaking with every impact as I jump down the flights. T-Garden isn't G-Garden but the Centra built to order, and the emergency stairs were in roughly the same place.

Stupid, I was so stupid.

Kurlen never trusted me, neither did Diran. Even if I had been the good little terrorist and did what they said, they had no intention of letting me walk home alive. The teams, the dormitories, it was just to screw me over. They didn't want to do something as stupid and risky as killing people and _just hoping_ they could get them all, their real plan was so much worse.

I slam through the steel door and I feel the dank old air wash across my face. Trabia Garden was never airborne like the other two, its flight rings destroyed by Galbad- by _my_ missile strike, before it could ever get airborne. The air down here is rotten, ancient, a thousand years old, and it feels like oil in my lungs. I look down and see catwalks and walkways, old Centran machinery covered in decades of dust. I can see movement down below and faint voices and I know my worst fears are true.

"Hey, what are you-"

I whirl around and see one of Kurlen's men staring at me. Before he can speak another word I grab him and slam him as hard as I can into the railing. Something cracks and before he can react I grab his head and slam it into the opposite metal railing. He drops soundless, blood already dripping under him, and I grab his rifle. He can take his own chances. I look down but there's no-one else up here. No time to stay quiet now. If-

"_ALMASY!"_

I could almost laugh, but I'm too busy dodging backwards. I'm not fast enough though and something kicks in my left shoulder. I bite my teeth and feel them grind together as I try to stop the scream from the bullet grazing through me. Even just going through flesh it burns like the sun and I have to scuttle back into the cover of the old machinery as Kurlen starts to fire into it.

I check the rifle with one arm. It's old but workable. I wrap the leather around my right arm and risk a glance around cover. A shadow moves across the emptiness of the metal piping at the other end of the walkway, and I duck back as another bullet whirls over me. Only one shadow.

"Lost your friends!" I shout at him.

"_I knew you were a fucking liar!"_

"What does that matter when an entire Garden is about to come down on top of your head!?" I'm reduced to shouting across the gap, dearly hoping it's true, and that Selphie's men are coming for us as we speak. I'll settle for them beating me to a pulp if this asshole comes down with me.

"_Oh it is, but not like you're hoping!"_

I'm about to ask him what he means when I hear it. A guttural roar of fury from below us and seems to travel directly through my bones, vibrating every atom in my body. Like somebody unleashed an angry behemoth at the bottom of Trabia Garden. But far worse.

"Not too late to call it off!"

"_Oh, it is!"_

I wonder what happened to the host. Kurlen probably put a bullet through the poor bastard's brain. Ifrit would have felt every jolt through his nervous system as he died. I can't imagine what the GF is tearing through down there, unleashed and in agony. I swear it's getting hotter even as I speak. His plan was never just to kill people. Ifrit will rampage until the insane heat and fire catch on something, and then all of T-Garden is going to go up. Total annihilation.

"Are you ready to go down with the ship!" I shout at Kurlen. "Because these are the only stairs up!"

That gives him pause, long enough to give me a breath. I look down and can already see a red haze and hear the dull creaking of steel under pressure. We have minutes before the entire MD level is consumed, and then a few more, maybe, before the old Centran technology reaches the end of its tethers. Enough stored energy to hoist thousands of tons into the air, all released at one point. There'll be nothing left.

"_Then why aren't you running too, you goddamn traitor!"_

Traitor, from a man like that. I want to argue but my own personal fire in my shoulder is reaching out through my body, and its getting hard to breathe.

_Because maybe you deserve this?_

Fuck that. I look at the stairs. A few meters between me and them, but Kurlen will have a perfect shot for a few seconds before I get up them. I know he'll take it. But I can't stay here. When Ifrit gets angry enough he'll tear through everything to get away. Including me.

And if I die here I'll never be able to find the bastard SeeD responsible for all this and punch him in his smug goddamn face. Or let Trepe do the same, either.

Trepe. What would Trepe say in a situation like this?

_Hoisting your problems onto her? How pitiful._

Not pitiful, smart. She's always been smarter than me.

_She would tell you to run. To run and live._

I haul myself up and leap as fast as I can for the stairs. I grasp the railing as Kurlen's first bullet flies past my head close enough that I can feel the wind as it passes. I take the stairs two at a time, my body screaming as I claw my way up. Something hits me in the leg and I grit my teeth and ignore it,, pushing myself back up the long flight of stairs, away from the death that's forming at the bottom of Trabia.

* * *

I get pushed aside in a human tidal wave, for once in my life my name and face ignored as people stream past me, orders shouted through the air. I try to focus but my vision stays a hazy blur as my shoulder and leg burn, the only thing keeping me standing the wall to my side and the knowledge of the thing beneath us.

I can feel cold air and stumble around, trying to head for it. Black tendrils grasp at the edges of my vision and I try to run, to escape them, but my leg won't let me.

I can see a rectangle of darkness ahead of me, the wind across my face. I grit my teeth one last time and push forward, the black tendrils sending stabbing agony through my body as I breach some invisible barrier and the white light falls away and my feet fall through the ground into something crunchy and soft-

I'm out.

_You're outside._

Don't stop, keep running.

Every step feels like agony and I tell myself _this_ step will be the last before I fall down, then _this_ step will be the last, every step until finally there's nothing left except the pain and a black emptiness inside and all around me. I fall to the ground and lay there in the freezing cold, covered in snow and alone.

I can hear a shallow _boom_ behind me coming from deep within the earth, and I try and look around, but my neck is on fire. I lay there in the snow and listen as the roars grow louder, one after another. The white structure behind me seems to split open as something red and burning emerges like a chick from an egg. It streaks away across the ground into the distance, and all I can do is watch as the shell it emerged from cracks further and smokes, sinking into itself, melting from within.

"Seifer."

I know the voice but I'm too tired to look up.

"_Quisty." _I haven't called her that in years. Decades. An old stone orphanage I can barely remember. Always looked out for us. I never deserved it.

I feel hands against my face and arm, and against the freezing cold of the snow they feel hot enough to burn. The final straw snaps and I scream and then-

Nothing.

* * *

Real life can just shove your head down and keep it there huh At the very least it convinced me two stories at once is a bad idea. So, updates to resume shortly!

~Cobray


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